Necessary Facts: Astronomy: Two Minor Books for the Backyard

Tuesday, April 5, 2022

Astronomy: Two Minor Books for the Backyard

There’s a lot of books out there for backyard stargazers. Amateur astronomers with some experience tend to recommend a few favorites with longevity.

Turn Left at Orion: Hundreds of Night Sky Objects to See in a Home Telescope by Guy Consolmagno and Dan M. Davis (Cambridge University Press; five editions 1989 to 2019);
Nightwatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe by Terence Dickson (Firefly Books; four editions 1989 to 2019);
and The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide by Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer (Firefly Books; four editions 1991 to 2021).

These two books are not at that level but there’s nothing wrong with them. You would have to search well to find them for more than $10 online and your local used bookstore probably has them for that much or less (and no shipping). And as always, check the city library.

Starwatch by Ben Mayer (New York: Perigee Books, 1984).

In a layout favored by book designers in the 1970s Starwatch by Ben Mayer offers two unique teaching aids for learning the night sky. The author shows how to construct “starframes” from clear kitchen wrap stretched on coat hangers bent into rectangles. Scaled with the illustrations in the book you can hold the frame up to the sky to find constellations and the deep sky objects within them.

Mayer also shows how to build a projection system that he calls a “problicom” for revealing new objects that have appeared on successive nights. His system requires two slide projectors. Mayer also insists that you can take pictures of the night sky with a standard 35mm camera and a 50mm lens. That being as it may, it is true that with a different machine on the same principle, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. Modern technology offers other solutions but the method is sound.

Those two projects open and close the book. Most of the book is a tour of 25 constellations in the northern night sky. The rest of the book is about celestial coordinates, comets, meteors, adapting to the dark, and other standard topics. For the constellations, every layout includes a classical artistic drawing, a guide to estimate the location, the geometric arrangement of the stars, and a list of interesting targets for your telescope.

The Stars : The Definitive Visual Guide to the Cosmos by Robert Dinwiddie, et al., delivers a solution to an esoteric problem with all books: we project a spherical sky onto a flat page. This criticism came up on the Cloudy Nights discussion board as a reason not to give a planisphere to a child. I reject the criticism but I understand the point. The illustrations in this book are spherical projections. Those prints are also pieces of a puzzle that could be reproduced, cut and pasted onto a sphere. Also included are call-outs to favored targets: the Messier objects (of course), binary stars, and so on.

The Stars: The Definitive Visual Guide to the Cosmos
by Robert Dinwiddie; David W Hughes;
Geraint H Jones; Ian Ridpath; Carole Stott;
Giles Sparrow (New York, New York : DK Publishing
and London : Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2016)