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