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Author: Sue French Review by: Rob Lambert I received a copy of Sue French's Celestial Sampler as a Christmas gift - you know, one of those "Honey, buy yourself a book as one of your Christmas presents" type gift - and it is quickly becoming one of my favorite books. Sue has been writing articles for Sky & Telescope since July 1999, when they first published her column, Small-Scope Sampler. Celestial Sampler is a compilation of her first 60 columns. Her column essays are arranged by month with five essays for each month. The essays include: - descriptions of double and variable stars, star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies that can be viewed through smaller telescopes like the Orion Starblast - some basic science behind many of the objects she observed - photographs by amateur astronomers - tabular listings of the deep-sky sights - finder charts - challenge objects that encourage you to push the limits of your equipment and skills
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Published by: Sky and Telescope Review by: Bob Sherman and Rob Lambert
If you want to do any serious observing of the night sky, you must have a first-rate sky atlas to guide you on your search for celestial objects. Many fine atlases exist, but we think we may have found one that will come closest to meeting your night-by-night needs.
The Pocket Sky Atlas, produced by Sky and Telescope is a wonderful little sky guide when you are out under the stars. It provides 80 main charts that contain 30,796 stars down to visual magnitude 7.6, roughly five times as many as you can normally see with the naked eye. Because all of these stars are readily visible in a low-power finder scope, they are helpful benchmarks and patterns for star hopping to any object of interest. The Atlas' General Index lists 1,500 deep-sky objects including all of the Astronomical League's Herschel 400 observing list. There are separate indices for the Caldwell and Messier objects. |
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Published by: Sky and Telescope Reviewed by: Geary Keilman
My wife, Laurie, won this book as a door prize at an LVAS meeting. I had seen the book in the Sky Publishing (Sky and Telescope) catalog and it piqued my interest. Basically, as described in the introduction to the book, it is a beginner's guide to stargazing with the unaided eye and/or binoculars from suburban or dark skies. It begins with a brief discussion of astronomy basics with lucid and easy to follow pictures and diagrams. |
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