Skip to main content

The Telescopic Tourist's Guide to the Moon - Andrew May ***

Once the potential reader gets over the concern of folding up like a telescopic umbrella, and realises that this book is about doing a tourist trail on the Moon using a telescope, this is a fine title, which deserves more than three stars if you are in the relatively small target market who will make use of a telescope - the three star rating treats it as a general popular science title - as an amateur astronomer's guide it gets five stars.

 It's hard to imagine an aspect of science that is so relatively easy to get immersed in when you are young, whether it's simply naked eye stargazing or using basic binoculars, but if you are to take things a little more seriously you need a telescope, and, as Andrew May points out, once you've got one the Moon is the star attraction (pun intended). Of course it's nice to be able to make out more of Jupiter than a dot - but you can explore so much detail on the Moon. When I was about 12, my dad bought a 6 inch reflector, and by far the most fun we had with it was when it was pointed at the Moon.

 For those who are telescopically inclined, May takes us through choosing a telescope, photographic options (including the clever way that software can combine multiple frames to make a much clearer image than a single one) and a various tours of aspects of the Moon's surface, from the great craters to sites of Apollo landings.

 I ought to stress that there is considerably more to this book - a real bonus - in bringing in lots of details on the nature of the Moon itself, lunar probes and science fiction's attempts to describe visits to the Moon and Moon colonies (there's even a map showing the locations of some of the most famous fictional lunar bases). Although I think the focus on telescopic observation means the book doesn't work as well as pure standalone read about the Moon, those who come for the guidebook will gain a huge amount from the excellent surrounding material.

 If I have one practical criticism, I think there could have been a bit more specific guidance on choice of telescope - we're told a lot, but the coverage is quite broad, leaving a beginner perhaps still uncertain which way to go - and the same applies to the best ways to take photographs etc. The problem, of course, with recommending specific bits of kit is that they rapidly go out of date - but it would be nice if you could read that section and come away knowing what's best to go with, or at least how to find what's the current best match for your requirements and pocket.

 Overall, though, for anyone beginning to explore the Moon with anything from binoculars to a heavy duty garden telescope, this is a brilliant introduction and guide.

 Paperback:  

Kindle:  

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more