Review: Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders
As I quickly learned after building my first telescope, the real trick in backyard astronomy is simply finding what's out there. Galaxies and nebulae are generally faint, and there are a lot of stars scattered about in the view. Just getting there (that is, locating an object and knowing with certainty what you're looking at) may not be half the fun, but it's well over half the challenge.
So I was delighted to see that Bob and Barbara Thompson have a new book from O'Reilly in their very welcome DIY Science series: Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders. It's a deep-sky observer's guide, written for an era when 12" and 14" instruments are in the hands of ordinary people, and deep-sky objects that were once thought the province of "big science" observatories only can be spotted on a good dark night outside major cities. An alphabetical listing of 50 constellations (the remaining 38 are too far south to be seen well in north temperate latitudes) provides overall maps of each individual constellation, as well as 10° finder charts for about 450 of the best objects to look for in the night sky. Many objects are accompanied by 60' field photographs, which are less to show you "how they look" (all are long-exposure shots and thus deceptively bright) than to give you a sense for their relative size in the sky: Most deep-sky objects are fairly small, but a few (like M31, M33 and the Veil Nebula) are larger than the full Moon, if orders of magnitude fainter. The photographs put those size differences into perspective.
Those (like myself) without computer-controlled scopes have to locate faint objects by spotting brighter nearby objects (generally bright stars) and then "star-hopping" to the object of interest. For me, the meat of the book lies in the 10° finder charts, one for each object, each chart including one or more overlapping 5° finder scope field circles for hopping to a 1° eyepiece field circle centered on the prize.
The first 65 pages ahead of the constellation listings present introductory material, explaining how the charts in the book work, how to choose and use modern observing equipment, and what all the jargon means. Newbies won't necessarily come in understanding what a "clean split" or a "dirty split" are, nor how the Trumpler Classification system works for open clusters, but it's all laid out in beautifully clear writing. I was particularly impressed by the coverage of eyepieces and nebula filters, most of which didn't exist even twenty years ago, and certainly not in the late 60s when I learned much of what I know.
The book is full of wonderful small touches, like a note on why there is no such thing as a truly green star, and how some amateur astronomers observe with binoculars by lying in a partially inflated (but empty!) kiddie pool, with the sides of the pool supporting their arms!
I don't have a lot of quibbles. The print seems awfully small to me, admitting that there is a huge amount of information in this book. I know enough about book publishing to recognize that larger type could have blown the page count out to a physically fragile and economically nonviable length.
To sum up: The stars haven't changed recently but our equipment has, and today's larger aperatures and vastly better eyepieces have brought many new objects into range for backyard astronomers. This is the book that will tell you how to find them and see them well with modern equipment. 520 pp. 8" X 9.75" (computer trim) Lay-flat binding. $29.99.
Highly recommended.