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| Introduction | |
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| About This Book | |
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| Conventions Used in This Book | |
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| What You're Not to Read | |
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| Foolish Assumptions | |
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| Icons Used in This Book | |
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| Where to Go from Here | |
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| Stalking the Cosmos | |
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| Seeing the Light: The Art and Science of Astronomy | |
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| Astronomy: The Science of Observation | |
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| What You See: The Language of Light | |
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| They wondered as they wandered: Understanding planets versus stars | |
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| If you see a Great Bear, start worrying: Naming stars and constellations | |
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| What do I spy? Spotting the Messier Catalog and other sky objects | |
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| The smaller, the brighter: Getting to the root of magnitudes | |
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| Looking back on light-years | |
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| Keep on moving: Figuring the positions of the stars | |
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| Gravity: A Force to Be Reckoned With | |
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| Space: A Commotion of Motion | |
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| Join the Crowd: Skywatching Activities and Resources | |
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| You're Not Alone: Astronomy Clubs, Websites, Smartphone Apps, and More | |
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| Joining an astronomy club for star-studded company | |
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| Checking websites, magazines, software, and apps | |
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| Visiting Observatories and Planetariums | |
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| Ogling the observatories | |
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| Popping in on planetariums | |
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| Vacationing with the Stars: Star Parties, Eclipse Trips, Dark Sky Parks, and More | |
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| Party on! Attending star parties | |
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| Getting festive at an AstroFest | |
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| To the path of totality: Taking eclipse cruises and tours | |
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| Motoring to telescope motels | |
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| Setting up camp at dark sky parks | |
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| The Way You Watch Tonight: Terrific Tools for Observing the Skies | |
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| Seeing Stars: A Sky Geography Primer | |
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| As Earth turns | |
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| … keep an eye on the North Star | |
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| Beginning with Naked-Eye Observation | |
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| Using Binoculars or a Telescope for a Better View | |
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| Binoculars: Sweeping the night sky | |
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| Telescopes: When closeness counts | |
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| Planning Your First Steps into Astronomy | |
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| Just Passing Through: Meteors, Comets, and Artificial Satellites | |
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| Meteors: Wishing on a Shooting Star | |
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| Spotting sporadic meteors, fireballs, and bolides | |
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| Watching a radiant sight: Meteor showers | |
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| Comets: The Lowdown on Dirty Ice Balls | |
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| Making heads and tails of a comet's structure | |
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| Waiting for the "comets of the century" | |
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| Hunting for the great comet | |
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| Artificial Satellites: Enduring a Love-Hate Relationship | |
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| Skywatching for artificial satellites | |
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| Finding satellite viewing predictions | |
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| Going Once Around the Solar System | |
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| A Matched Pair: Earth and Its Moon | |
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| Putting Earth under the Astronomical Microscope | |
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| One of a kind: Earth's unique characteristics | |
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| Spheres of influence: Earth's distinct regions | |
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| Examining Earth's Time, Seasons, and Age | |
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| Orbiting for all time | |
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| Tilting toward the seasons | |
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| Estimating Earth's age | |
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| Making Sense of the Moon | |
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| Get ready to howl: Identifying phases of the Moon | |
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| In the shadows: Watching lunar eclipses | |
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| Hard rock: Surveying lunar geology | |
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| Quite an impact: Considering a theory about the Moon's origin | |
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| Earth's Near Neighbors: Mercury, Venus, and Mars | |
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| Mercury: Weird, Hot, and Mostly Metal | |
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| Dry, Acidic, and Hilly: Steering Clear of Venus | |
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| Red, Cold, and Barren: Uncovering the Mysteries of Mars | |
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| Where has all the water gone? | |
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| Does Mars support life? | |
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| Differentiating Earth through Comparative Planetology | |
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| Observing the Terrestrial Planets with Ease | |
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| Understanding elongation, opposition, and conjunction | |
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| Viewing Venus and its phases | |
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| Watching Mars as it loops around | |
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| Outdoing Copernicus by observing Mercury | |
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| Rock On: The Asteroid Belt and Near-Earth Objects | |
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| Taking a Brief Tour of the Asteroid Belt | |
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| Understanding the Threat That Near-Earth Objects Pose | |
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| When push comes to shove: Nudging an asteroid | |
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| Forewarned is forearmed: Surveying NEOs to protect Earth | |
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| Searching for Small Points of Light | |
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| Helping to track an occultation | |
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| Timing an asteroidal occultation | |
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| Great Balls of Gas: Jupiter and Saturn | |
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| The Pressure's On: Journeying Inside Jupiter and Saturn | |
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| Almost a Star: Gazing at Jupiter | |
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| Scanning for the Great Red Spot | |
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| Shooting for Galileo's moons | |
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| Our Main Planetary Attraction: Setting Your Sights on Saturn | |
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| Ringing around the planet | |
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| Storm chasing across Saturn | |
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| Monitoring a moon of major proportions | |
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| Making sense of a cryptic moon | |
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| Far Out! Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and Beyond | |
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| Breaking the Ice with Uranus and Neptune | |
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| Bull's-eye! Tilted Uranus and its features | |
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| Against the grain: Neptune and its biggest moon | |
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| Meeting Pluto, Planet or Not | |
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| The moon chip doesn't float far from the planet | |
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| Little Pluto compared to some big moons | |
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| Buckling Down to the Kuiper Belt | |
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| Viewing the Outer Planets | |
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| Sighting Uranus | |
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| Distinguishing Neptune from a star | |
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| Straining to see Pluto | |
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| Meeting Old Sol and Other Stars | |
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| The Sun: Star of Earth | |
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| Surveying the Sunscape | |
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| The Sun's size and shape: A great bundle of gas | |
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| The Sun's regions: Caught between the core and the corona | |
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| Solar activity: What's going on out there? | |
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| Solar wind: Playing with magnets | |
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| Solar CSI: The mystery of the missing solar neutrinos | |
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| Four billion and counting: The life expectancy of the Sun | |
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| Don't Make a Blinding Mistake: Safe Techniques for Solar Viewing | |
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| Viewing the Sun by projection.: | |
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| Viewing the Sun through front-end filters | |
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| Fun with the Sun: Solar Observation | |
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| Tracking sunspots | |
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| Experiencing solar eclipses | |
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| Looking at solar pictures on the Net | |
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| Taking a Trip to the Stars | |
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| Life Cycles of the Hot and Massive | |
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| Young stellar objects: Taking baby steps | |
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| Main sequence stars: Enjoying a long adulthood | |
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| Red giants: Burning out the golden years | |
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| Closing time: Coming up on the tail end of stellar evolution | |
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| Star Color, Brightness, and Mass | |
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| Spectral types: What color is my star? | |
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| Star light, star bright: Luminosity classifications | |
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| The brighter they burn, the bigger they swell: Mass determines class | |
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| The H-R diagram | |
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| Eternal Partners: Binary and Multiple Stars | |
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| Binary stars and the Doppler effect | |
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| Two stars are binary, but three's a crowd: Multiple stars | |
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| Change Is Good: Variable Stars | |
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| Go the distance: Pulsating stars | |
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| Explosive neighbors: Flare stars | |
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| Nice to nova: Exploding stars | |
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| Stellar hide-and-seek: Eclipsing binary stars | |
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| Hog the starlight: Microlensing events | |
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| Your Stellar Neighbors | |
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| How to Help Scientists by Observing the Stars | |
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| Star- Studies to Aid with Your Brain and Computer | |
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| Galaxies: The Milky Way and Beyond | |
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| Unwrapping the Milky Way | |
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| How and when did the Milky Way form? | |
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| What shape is the Milky Way? | |
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| Where can you find the Milky Way? | |
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| Star Clusters: Meeting Galactic Associates | |
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| A loose fit: Open clusters | |
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| A tight squeeze: Globular clusters | |
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| Fun while it lasted: OB associations | |
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| Taking a Shine to Nebulae | |
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| Picking out planetary nebulae | |
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| Breezing through supernova remnants | |
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| Enjoying Earth's best nebular views | |
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| Getting a Grip on Galaxies | |
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| Surveying spiral, barred spiral, and lenticular galaxies | |
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| Examining elliptical galaxies | |
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| Looking at irregular, dwarf, and low surface brightness galaxies | |
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| Gawking at great galaxies | |
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| Discovering the Local Group of Galaxies | |
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| Checking out clusters of galaxies | |
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| Sizing up superclusters, cosmic voids, and Great Walls | |
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| Joining Galaxy Zoo for Fun and Science | |
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| Digging into Black Holes and Quasars | |
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| Black Holes: Keeping Your Distance | |
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| Looking over the black hole roster | |
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| Poking around the black hole interior | |
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| Surveying a black hole's surroundings | |
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| Warping space and time | |
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| Watching stars get swallowed by black holes | |
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| Quasars: Defying Definitions | |
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| Measuring the size of a quasar | |
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| Getting up to speed on jets | |
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| Exploring quasar spectra | |
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| Active Galactic Nuclei: Welcome to the Quasar Family | |
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| Sifting through different types of AGN | |
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| Examining the power behind AGN | |
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| Proposing the Unified Model of AGN | |
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| Pondering the Remarkable Universe | |
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| Is Anybody Out There? SETI and Planets of Other Suns | |
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| Using Drake's Equation to Discuss SETI | |
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| SETI Projects: Listening for E.T. | |
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| The flight of Project Phoenix | |
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| Space scanning with other SETI projects | |
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| Hot targets for SETI | |
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| SETI wants you! | |
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| Discovering Alien Worlds | |
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| Changing ideas on exoplanets | |
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| Finding exoplanets | |
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| Meeting the (exo)planets | |
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| Checking out planets for fun and science | |
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| Astrobiology: How's Life on Other Worlds? | |
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| Extremophiles: Living the hard way | |
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| Seeking life in the solar system | |
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| Delving into Dark Matter and Antimatter | |
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| Dark Matter: Understanding the Universal Glue | |
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| Gathering the evidence for dark matter | |
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| Debating the makeup of dark matter | |
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| Taking a Shot in the Dark: Searching for Dark Matter | |
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| Looking for WIMPs and other microscopic dark matter | |
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| MACHOs: Making a brighter image | |
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| Mapping dark matter with gravitational lensing | |
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| Dueling Antimatter: Proving That Opposites Attract | |
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| The Big Bang and the Evolution of the Universe | |
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| Evidence for the Big Bang | |
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| Inflation: A Swell Time in the Universe | |
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| Something from nothing: Inflation and the vacuum | |
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| Falling flat: Inflation and the shape of the universe | |
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| Dark Energy: The Universal Accelerator | |
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| Universal Info Pulled from the Cosmic Microwave Background | |
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| Finding the lumps in the cosmic microwave background | |
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| Mapping the universe with the cosmic microwave background | |
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| In a Galaxy Far Away: Standard Candles and the Hubble Constant | |
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| Standard candles: How do scientists measure galaxy distances? | |
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| The Hubble constant: How fast do galaxies really move? | |
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| The Fate of the Universe | |
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| The Part of Tens | |
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| Ten Strange Facts about Astronomy and Space | |
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| You Have Tiny Meteorites in Your Hair | |
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| A Comet's Tail Often Leads the Way | |
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| Earth Is Made of Rare and Unusual Matter | |
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| High Tide Comes on Both Sides of the Earth at the Same Time | |
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| On Venus, the Rain Never Falls on the Plain | |
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| Rocks from Mars Dot the Earth | |
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| Pluto Was Discovered from the Predictions of a False Theory | |
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| Sunspots Are Not Dark | |
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| A Star in Plain View May Have Exploded, but No One Knows | |
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| You May Have Seen the Big Bang on an Old Television | |
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| Ten Common Errors about Astronomy and Space | |
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| "The Light from That Star Took 1,000 Light-Years to Reach Earth" | |