Astronomy Books

A compelling insight into the way that astronomers work, explaining how they make the discoveries that make headlines, as well as the stories behind those headlines. From the first steps which measured the distances to the nearest stars, to the latest discovery that the Universe is expanding at an ever faster rate, John Gribbin puts deep space into perspective with the aid of specially commissioned illustrations and revealing photographs from the latest generation of astronomical telescopes.

"We are children of the night," proclaims Chet Raymo in his excitingly original and many-layered guide to the universe and our place in it. Not so very long ago, the night sky was an intimate part of people's lives. That intimacy has eroded over time, but Raymo's new book offers readers the chance to recapture a personal connection to the heavens.

It's a beautiful, clear night and you decide to look up, once again, at the thousands and thousands of stars you have seen all your life. Each is anonymous in the vast sweep of the heavens. It's impossible to distinguish one bright star from another, one constellation from the next, without help. Here it is. The product of 20 years face-to-face with the sky in all latitudes of this blue planet, The Great Atlas of the Stars was created to give the lay-person and amateur astronomer a map of the principal constellations and grand stars seen in the whole Northern Hemisphere. It covers the 30 most important constellations of the 88 visible from Earth.

Stephen Hawking, the most important theoretical physicist since Einstein, recaps for the lay reader the theories--such as supersymmetry, M-theory, superstring theory, and black holes--that scientists have been puzzling over since the publication of his bestseller A Brief History of Time.