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A well-illustrated historical survey of the science of measuring the brightness and colours of stars - for professional astronomers, amateur astronomers and historians of science.
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel, the "inspiring" (People), little-known true story of women's landmark contributions to astronomy A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Economist, Smithsonian, Nature, and NPR's Science Friday Nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "A joy to read.” —The Wall Street Journal In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women's colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair. Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe is the hidden history of the women whose contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.
This lively and entertaining history of the long struggle to measure the distance to the stars will appeal to general readers as well as to amateur and professional astronomers. Readers will encounter fascinating historical characters, from ancient Greeks to 19th-century scientists. Well illustrated, with contemporary pictures plus extensive notes on further reading. 2002 edition.
The Bible says the universe is just thousands of years old, and yet we can see stars that are billions of light-years away. Until now, creation scientists have not had a satisfactory answer to this puzzle, but the new cosmology outlined in this book offers a fresh and scientifically sound solution. Though he challenges some traditional creationist theories, Dr. Humphreys takes Scripture very straightforwardly, upholding its inerrancy and the idea of a young universe as he explains days one through four of creation week.
This book summarizes the research advances in star identification that the author’s team has made over the past 10 years, systematically introducing the principles of star identification, general methods, key techniques and practicable algorithms. It also offers examples of hardware implementation and performance evaluation for the star identification algorithms. Star identification is the key step for celestial navigation and greatly improves the performance of star sensors, and as such the book include the fundamentals of star sensors and celestial navigation, the processing of the star catalog and star images, star identification using modified triangle algorithms, star identification using star patterns and using neural networks, rapid star tracking using star matching between adjacent frames, as well as implementation hardware and using performance tests for star identification. It is not only valuable as a reference book for star sensor designers and researchers working in pattern recognition and other related research fields, but also as teaching resource for senior postgraduate and graduate students majoring in information processing, computer science, artificial intelligence, aeronautics and astronautics, automation and instrumentation. Dr. Guangjun Zhang is a professor at the School of Instrumentation Science and Opto-electronics Engineering, Beihang University, China and also the Vice President of Beihang University, China
An Introduction to Astronomical Photometry Using CCDsBy W. Romanishin
You too can follow in the steps of the great astronomers such as Hipparchus, Galileo, Kepler and Hubble, who all contributed so much to our modern understanding of the cosmos. This book gives the student or amateur astronomer the following tools to replicate some of these seminal observations from their own homes: With your own eyes: Use your own observations and measurements to discover and confirm the phenomena of the seasons, the analemma and the equation of time, the logic behind celestial coordinates, and even the precession of the equinoxes. With a consumer-grade digital camera: Record the changing brightness of an eclipsing binary star and show that a pulsating star changes color as it brightens and dims. Add an inexpensive diffraction grating to your camera and see the variety of spectral features in the stars, and demonstrate that the Sun’s spectrum is similar to one particular type of stellar spectrum. With a backyard telescope: Add a CCD imager and you can measure the scale of the Solar System and the distance to a nearby star. You could even measure the distance to another galaxy and observe the cosmological redshift of the expanding universe. Astronomical Discoveries You Can Make, Too! doesn’t just tell you about the development of astronomy; it shows you how to discover for yourself the essential features of the universe.
Founded in 1911, the AAVSO boasts over 1200 members and observers and is the world's largest non-profit organization dedicated to variable star observation. This timely book marks the AAVSO's centennial year, presenting an authoritative and accurate history of this important association. Writing in an engaging and accessible style, the authors move chronologically through five eras of the AAVSO, discussing the evolution of its structure and purpose. Throughout the text, the main focus is on the thousands of individuals whose contributions have made the AAVSO's progress possible. Describing a century of interaction between amateur and professional astronomers, the authors celebrate the collaborative relationships that have existed over the years. As the definitive history of the first hundred years of the AAVSO, this text has broad appeal and will be of interest to amateur and professional astronomers, as well as historians and sociologists of science in general.
A richly illustrated history of Wisconsin’s astronomical innovations Explore the remarkable story of Wisconsin astronomers whose curiosity, persistence, and innovation helped us better understand our universe. Chasing the Stars traces the history of the University of Wisconsin’s Washburn Observatory, where some of the world’s most cutting-edge astronomical inventions were born. Learn about the earliest Indigenous stargazers, the women who worked as the first human computers, the astronomers who sold time by the stars, the scientists who shrank the Milky Way, and the crucial role Wisconsin astronomers played in the development of modern astrophysics and space astronomy. This extraordinary book features more than 100 modern and historic photographs that illustrate the people and science behind Wisconsin’s astronomical innovations. Designed for lay readers and astronomers alike, Chasing the Stars inspires all of us to look up at the sky in wonder.