Astronomy

[Skybird]

I have invested money today into an nold field of interest of mine, astronomy.

In the early 80s, when I was at Gymnasium in Berlin, regular astronomy courses additional to regular physics courses and also counting for the final notes of the Abitur, were rare, and considered to be exotic. My good old school

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/thumb/e/e7/Rheingau-Oberschule.JPG/800px-Rheingau-Oberschule.JPG (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/e/e7/Rheingau-Oberschule.JPG)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheingau-Oberschule (gotta love that building)

offered two such courses, which was lucky, because I managed to squeeze out maximum points A+ for both courses without needing to work for it, which helped my final Abitur mean score quite a bit. :)

I considered it for weeks now and now have decided to engage on the field of astronomy again, because I have the time, the interest, and the investements made today I can afford. So I separated from 80 bucks and bought a copy of Bennett/Donahue/Schneider/Voit: The Cosmic Perspective, 5th edition (German), after i checked it in the bookshop for almost one hour, finding myself increasingly excited and fascinated. While not everything is new to me, the wide perspective and the level of detail neverthelss is new indeed, coupled with very student-friendly access to the matter, minimising the use of number stuff and formulas, giving good and plenty illustrations, and also containing another planetarium software (Stargazer 4.5, I knew Cellestia and Stellarium so far) as well as access to the online platform http://www.masteringastronomy.com/ (http://www.masteringastronomy.com/). I consider to register there as well and maybe follow a full course they offer, but i will wait a while until i have dived a bit into the book, which with almost 4 kilograms and 1150 pages is nothing you want to read while already lying in your bed in the evening. :)

Has anyone experience with that online course and has some advice and reommendations on it?

However, it feels as if I got a quality book there, and exactly what matches my need and interest best: non-professional, but purely private interest, coupled with easy access and ergonomic presentation.

Feels like a happy day today!:) And 80 bucks well-spent.

[SteamWake]

Nope no experience with that course.

But...

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=157654&highlight=telescope

[XabbaRus]

Hi Sky

I have a telescope now but haven't used it due to lousy weather and too light nights.

Anyway there is another free astronomy program called Cartes du Ciel

http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/start

The above link is for version 3. There is an earlier version too.

I use it on my netbook as it doesn't require the high graphics that Stellarium does. In fact for skuy mapping it is better as it is clearer.

I have both versions installed and it is very good.

As for online classes I haven't a clue.

[Skybird]

Thanks Xabba, SteamWake.

The online course is by the same authors who wrote the book, and it is en detail basing on the book, allowing tutors to interact with their students at university beyond the level of normal university relations, it features additonal material and interactive multimedia things. It seems to be the perfect complementation for the book. Book and online platform both are published and run by no unknown in academic publishing, Pearson Education Publishing. They offer this dual approach for several of their books. It became well-known, it seems, especially for their basic teaching book on physics.

I went through the several pages of explanations on the didactics and desgin of the book, and the structure of the presentation. Also there was a forword by a guest writer that immediately touched a string in me, I liked it so much that I searched the web for the original English essay that the author had published in a science magazine three years ago (for obvious reasons I preferred to buy the book in German...) , and I found it.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did:


Cosmic Perspective

By Neil deGrasse Tyson (http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/author/1364)
Universe: The 100th Essay April 2007



Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices. —James Ferguson, Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, And Made Easy To Those Who Have Not Studied Mathematics (1757)
Long before anyone knew that the universe had a beginning, before we knew that the nearest large galaxy lies two and a half million light-years from Earth, before we knew how stars work or whether atoms exist, James Ferguson's enthusiastic introduction to his favorite science rang true. Yet his words, apart from their eighteenth-century flourish, could have been written yesterday.

But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farmworker. Not the sweatshop worker. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity's place in the universe. You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in which news of your discoveries can be routinely disseminated. By those measures, most citizens of industrialized nations do quite well.

Yet the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the Moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth.

When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.

When I pore over the data that establish the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day—every twenty-four-hour rotation of Earth—people kill and get killed in the name of someone else's conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God kill in the name of their nation's needs or wants.

When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet choreographed by the forces of gravity, sometimes I forget that too many people act in wanton disregard for the delicate interplay of Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and land, with consequences that our children and our children's children will witness and pay for with their health and well-being.

And sometimes I forget that powerful people rarely do all they can to help those who cannot help themselves.

I occasionally forget those things because, however big the world is—in our hearts, our minds, and our outsize atlases—the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.

Consider an adult who tends to the traumas of a child: a broken toy, a scraped knee, a schoolyard bully. Adults know that kids have no clue what constitutes a genuine problem, because inexperience greatly limits their childhood perspective.

As grown-ups, dare we admit to ourselves that we, too, have a collective immaturity of view? Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Apparently not. And the evidence abounds. Part the curtains of society's racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers.

Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered each other because of them.

Back in February 2000, the newly rebuilt Hayden Planetarium featured a space show called “Passport to the Universe,” which took visitors on a virtual zoom from New York City to the edge of the cosmos. En route the audience saw Earth, then the solar system, then the 100 billion stars of the Milky Way galaxy shrink to barely visible dots on the planetarium dome.

Within a month of opening day, I received a letter from an Ivy League professor of psychology whose expertise was things that make people feel insignificant. I never knew one could specialize in such a field. The guy wanted to administer a before-and-after questionnaire to visitors, assessing the depth of their depression after viewing the show. “Passport to the Universe,” he wrote, elicited the most dramatic feelings of smallness he had ever experienced.

How could that be? Every time I see the space show (and others we've produced), I feel alive and spirited and connected. I also feel large, knowing that the goings-on within the three-pound human brain are what enabled us to figure out our place in the universe.

[pagebreak]Allow me to suggest that it's the professor, not I, who has misread nature. His ego was too big to begin with, inflated by delusions of significance and fed by cultural assumptions that human beings are more important than everything else in the universe.

In all fairness to the fellow, powerful forces in society leave most of us susceptible. As was I . . . until the day I learned in biology class that more bacteria live and work in one centimeter of my colon than the number of people who have ever existed in the world. That kind of information makes you think twice about who—or what—is actually in charge.

From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living and extinct, extending back nearly 4 billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth.

I know what you're thinking: we're smarter than bacteria.

No doubt about it, we're smarter than every other living creature that ever walked, crawled, or slithered on Earth. But how smart is that? We cook our food. We compose poetry and music. We do art and science. We're good at math. Even if you're bad at math, you're probably much better at it than the smartest chimpanzee, whose genetic identity varies in only trifling ways from ours. Try as they might, primatologists will never get a chimpanzee to learn the multiplication table or do long division.

If small genetic differences between us and our fellow apes account for our vast difference in intelligence, maybe that difference in intelligence is not so vast after all.

Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee's. To such a species our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door. These creatures would study Stephen Hawking (who occupies the same endowed professorship once held by Newton at the University of Cambridge) because he's slightly more clever than other humans, owing to his ability to do theoretical astrophysics and other rudimentary calculations in his head.

If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could justifiably celebrate our brilliance. We might be entitled to walk around thinking we're distant and distinct from our fellow creatures. But no such gap exists. Instead, we are one with the rest of nature, fitting neither above nor below, but within.

Need more ego softeners? Simple comparisons of quantity, size, and scale do the job well.

Take water. It's simple, common, and vital. There are more molecules of water in an eight-ounce cup of the stuff than there are cups of water in all the world's oceans. Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world's water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.

How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth's entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid.

Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.

Want a sweeping view of the past? Our unfolding cosmic perspective takes you there. Light takes time to reach Earth's observatories from the depths of space, and so you see objects and phenomena not as they are but as they once were. That means the universe acts like a giant time machine: the farther away you look, the further back in time you see—back almost to the beginning of time itself. Within that horizon of reckoning, cosmic evolution unfolds continuously, in full view.

Want to know what we're made of? Again, the cosmic perspective offers a bigger answer than you might expect. The chemical elements of the universe are forged in the fires of high-mass stars that end their lives in stupendous explosions, enriching their host galaxies with the chemical arsenal of life as we know it. The result? The four most common chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.

Yes, we are stardust. But we may not be of this Earth. Several separate lines of research, when considered together, have forced investigators to reassess who we think we are and where we think we came from.
First, computer simulations show that when a large asteroid strikes a planet, the surrounding areas can recoil from the impact energy, catapulting rocks into space. From there, they can travel to—and land on—other planetary surfaces. Second, microorganisms can be hardy. Some survive the extremes of temperature, pressure, and radiation inherent in space travel. If the rocky flotsam from an impact hails from a planet with life, microscopic fauna could have stowed away in the rocks' nooks and crannies. Third, recent evidence suggests that shortly after the formation of our solar system, Mars was wet, and perhaps fertile, even before Earth was.
[pagebreak]Those findings mean it's conceivable that life began on Mars and later seeded life on Earth, a process known as panspermia. So all earthlings might—just might—be descendants of Martians.

Again and again across the centuries, cosmic discoveries have demoted our self-image. Earth was once assumed to be astronomically unique, until astronomers learned that Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun. Then we presumed the Sun was unique, until we learned that the countless stars of the night sky are suns themselves. Then we presumed our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire known universe, until we established that the countless fuzzy things in the sky are other galaxies, dotting the landscape of our known universe.

Today, how easy it is to presume that one universe is all there is. Yet emerging theories of modern cosmology, as well as the continually reaffirmed improbability that anything is unique, require that we remain open to the latest assault on our plea for distinctiveness: multiple universes, otherwise known as the “multiverse,” in which ours is just one of countless bubbles bursting forth from the fabric of the cosmos.

The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it's more than just what you know. It's also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear:

The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone.
The cosmic perspective is humble.
The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.
The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.
The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.
The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place.
The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote, but a precious mote and, for the moment, the only home we have.
The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.
The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and sex.
The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag waving and space exploration do not mix.
The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.

At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.

Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock.

During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their “low contracted prejudices.” And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace the cosmic perspective.

http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/print/1367


Tyson is none of the scientists contributing to this book, they just used his essay from another publication as a forword. To me it is a nice and sympathetic summary on the meaning of science, and why science is anti-religious - but certainly also is deeply spiritual.

[Gerald]

Hi Sky

I have a telescope now but haven't used it due to lousy weather and too light nights.

Anyway there is another free astronomy program called Cartes du Ciel

http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/start

The above link is for version 3. There is an earlier version too.

I use it on my netbook as it doesn't require the high graphics that Stellarium does. In fact for skuy mapping it is better as it is clearer.

I have both versions installed and it is very good.

As for online classes I haven't a clue. Do you have more interesting links to other places or objects? :hmmm:

[TLAM Strike]

Neil deGrasse Tyson is good but he is no Dr. Rodney McKay... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Me3-r5rsUSI)

Joking aside Tyson is a great guy, very smart and and know how to make the complex understandable. I hope you enjoy your new book Sky. :up:


Slight thread hijack but I've been considering buying a pair of cheap binoculars for stargazing and wondering if anyone around here has had any success with them for that? :hmmm:

And no I am not planning on using them for searching the sky at night for Klingon invasion. :O:

[Pioneer]

Jump in.

I completed my degree with a major in Astronomy, not celestial though. For two years I had to complete mine online as I was stationed remotely from campus.

Any on line course is better than not doing it all.

[Skybird]

Jump in.

I completed my degree with a major in Astronomy, not celestial though. For two years I had to complete mine online as I was stationed remotely from campus.

Any on line course is better than not doing it all.
I envy you, in the US you can study astronomy as a separate discipline, but not in germany, here it only is one one or two basic courses in the second part of studying physics. If it would be a separate disipline here, maybe my life would have run different, for it could have been that then I would have studied astronomy instead of psychology. Physics scared me away although I hold a high general interest in natural science, first because the plenty of time spend with basic mechanics does not intrest me (it seems to be the bigest chapüter in any physics book), and second: too much formulas and mathematics. I'm weak in doing these. My skills end beyond simple trigonometry, percentage calculations, the rule of three, and simple fractional arithmetic. the statistics courses at university left me only a theopretical understanding of the backgrounds. I would be unable to calculate a logarithm or a cluster analysis out of the blue.

[Vladivostok]

I envy you, in the US you can study astronomy as a separate discipline, but not in germany, here it only is one one or two basic courses in the second part of studying physics.

The university of Stockholm offers a programme in astronomy, and seeing it's all EU/EES the education itself is free. The down-side to it would probably be that the entire programme is held in Swedish. With a will of steel though... :03:

[Pioneer]

I envy you, in the US you can study astronomy as a separate discipline,

Clarification: I completed my degree while still living in Australia.

[Skybird]

On the matter, two highly interesting sources, just in case you do not know them:

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/Home.aspx
Fascinating!!!

http://hubblesite.org/
Check the so-called ultra deep field photographs. when watching them for long enough time, trying to grasp what your eyes is being shown, you lose any motivation to discuss and to debate - but you just be, and that is all. If any more argument is needed for claiming that science and spirituality go ahnd in hand - these pictures are delivering them, non-verbal and culture-free. :)

On the book and online course I mentioned, I can only say: the book is brilliant, the best didactic presentation of material for students that I have ever seen, in the way that it does it's job much better than any book I have had when studying psychology. If you plan to embark on learning a bit of substantial basic training in general astronomy, but also want a decent level of academic standrad and detail, and want material being covered that would match let's say two semestres of introductory courses in astronomy at college or university, than this is probably by far the best choice you can consider. Compared to what is offred online and in the book, the price is cheap.

I have nothing but praise for that book.

Actually I am spending systematical working effort and time on it as if I were studying for real. It is very great fun. the best decision I have made since quite some time.

[Weiss Pinguin]

but i will wait a while until i have dived a bit into the book, which with almost 4 kilograms and 1150 pages is nothing you want to read while already lying in your bed in the evening. :)
Sounds like it's time for a 1x TC patrol :O: I wish you luck in your studies :yep:

[XabbaRus]

I have put the book on my amazon wishlist.

I'll give you guys the URL and if you feel generous please purchase..:D

Only kidding but I am looking into it.

I'm looking at getting a 2x Barlow lense for my scope. It already has a 10mm eyepiece and a 25mm wide field so from asking on forums it has been suggested that a barlow is the way to go as I am still learning.

My scope is a 130 diameter parabloic mirror with a 650 long tube.

Skywatcher 130P, won some awards and all round has good reviews.

[Platapus]

I have very fond memories of using my telescope to look at the heavenly bodies..... what a sight.... breathtaking.....then she started closing the drapes. :damn:

[Gerald]

I have very fond memories of using my telescope to look at the heavenly bodies..... what a sight.... breathtaking.....then she started closing the drapes. :damn: :haha:

[TLAM Strike]

I have very fond memories of using my telescope to look at the heavenly bodies..... what a sight.... breathtaking.....then she started closing the drapes. :damn:

:haha:

Got to invest in binoculars, you not as conspicuous when using them. :03:

A Ghilie suit helps too. :O:

[TLAM Strike]

Had an interesting night with my new binoculars.

At 09:45 (My time) I spotted a satellite heading east though the constellation Cygnus (I was looking at Deneb at the time).

I also looked quite a bit at Altair and Vega.

I might go back out before bed since I hope to spot Neptune in about an hour once its over the tree line.

[Neptunus Rex]

Slight thread hijack but I've been considering buying a pair of cheap binoculars for stargazing and wondering if anyone around here has had any success with them for that? :hmmm:

And no I am not planning on using them for searching the sky at night for Klingon invasion. :O:

I started with bino's before making the high cost plung for a telescope.

Started with cheapo 5x22's. Moved up to more expensive Celestron Ultima 8x56's designed for night use. That's the key. Most run of the mill bino's are designed for day time use with small exit pupil width. If you hold your bino's at arms length away and look in the eye pieces, if the circle of light is small, small exit pupil. Bino's for night use have larger exit pupils.

I have an 8" SCT telescope, but I still use my 8x56's for quick stuff and wide field views.

How are the ones you picked up?

[Takeda Shingen]

At 09:45 (My time) I spotted a satellite heading east though the constellation Cygnus (I was looking at Deneb at the time).

Amazing that you could see all of that detail during the day.

[Neptunus Rex]

Had an interesting night with my new binoculars.

At 09:45 (My time) I spotted a satellite heading east though the constellation Cygnus (I was looking at Deneb at the time).

I also looked quite a bit at Altair and Vega.

I might go back out before bed since I hope to spot Neptune in about an hour once its over the tree line.

August 27th, Mars and Earth will be at their closest point. At 75X, Mars will look about the same size as the Moon does with the naked eye.

[The Third Man]

I heard there was a theory based on the red shift of distant stars that the universe is older than the 13-15 billion years we are used to.

I won't pretend to understand the reasons but it has to do with how far we can see into the past, and the theory of realativity.

The little I understand.....

That we can see 13.7-15 Billion years into the past, which sets our perception of the age of the universe. But another civilization sitting close to that 13.7 or 15 millions of light years away from us could see another 13.7-15 billion years beyound our visual/electromegnetic sight.

[Skybird]

That we can see 13.7-15 Billion years into the past, which sets our perception of the age of the universe.


Not necessarily. you must differ between two terms that astronomers differ between, too: the "universe", and the "observable universe". But every-day-language usually refers to the observable universe when only the term "universe" is used. I could very well be that the universe is bigger than we know, that there is something beyond the range to which we can see, or that indeed we need to think of multiverses: a high number of universes coexisting (I personally think this is likely, since it just would follow a trend in the way how our observable universe is structured hierarchically: star systems -> galaxies -> local groups of galaxies -> supercluster of local groups -> a web-like structure formed arouind huge voids by superclusters with 100 billion galaxies, this is our current image of the observable universe. In the observable universe we can look only as far away as the universe is old, due to the link of time and lightspeed: we cannot see light from a place that is more distant in lightyears than the light has had time in years to travel. This defines what we call the border of the (expanding) universe.

The Big Bang is just a model, a theory, because for the most it explains a greater amount of known info and observations, than other theories do. But a theory is only a shadowbox into which we put the poieces of our ideas and observbations accoridng to the system we see fit. If the box does not meet our needs or becomes too small, we chnage it for another that suits our needs better. The Big Bang theory has problems for me. It does not explain how and why (!) there should have been nothing, and suddenly somethign started to be. How could this be? Why even should this be? why isn't there just a big "nothingness" anymore? And if there is "something" that is expanding, what is beyond the border of this "something"? There must be something, else thinking of a borderline between something and nothing makes no sense. and a border there seems to be, else the universe would be unlimited in size (another hard to grab conception). However, I tend to beolieve that when we say "border of the universe", in fact we only talk about the border, the limits of our knoweldge about the existence of all "what is".

I cannot separate astronomy from spirituality, I never could. And the fact that not only we humans, but everything, all the universe as we are able to perceive it, is existing, is nothing but an unexplained and probably unexplainable wonder. We are irrelevant to the universe, that small we are. But here we sit, being able to use our brain to at least asking questions and reflecting about ourselves and this giant thing around us, and about the unsolved question of our existence, reaching out for what is so huge in dimension that it renders us completely unimportant by its own majestic size - and nevertheless we are capable to think in a language by whose terms (mathematics) what is essentially infinity becomes describable in finite terms. We might be unimportant to the universe, but neverthless this is what also forms our greatness - without which the universe maybe would not be what it is. If there is no witness who would hear the tree in the forest falling, then the fall is noiseless.

And the other qurstion: how many others witnesses there are, and what is their way of realsing the fall of trees?

[The Third Man]

The Big Bang is kust a model


That is how I feel. The more I think I know the less i know.


I know you are trying to help my understanding. But can you please understand my limitations and give me me a more concise explanation .

thank you so much for understanding my point and expalining your position.

[Skybird]

That is how I feel. The more I think I know the less i know.

A good scientiist, no matter the branch, always thinks something like this ^ . Leave absolute, ultimatie answers to religious dogmas - science, if done responsibly, never claims to produce ultimate answers - only tries to make best sense possible at a given time of what it observes, expressing it in models of varying but always limited persistence.

The more we learn, the more we learn how little we know.
Talking about humbleness!

I know you are trying to help my understanding. But can you please understand my limitations and give me me a more concise explanation .

Explanation for what? The nature of scientific theory? The model of Big Bang? The model of the observable universe?

[TLAM Strike]

Amazing that you could see all of that detail during the day. Sorry 9:45 PM. :03:

I started with bino's before making the high cost plung for a telescope.

Started with cheapo 5x22's. Moved up to more expensive Celestron Ultima 8x56's designed for night use. That's the key. Most run of the mill bino's are designed for day time use with small exit pupil width. If you hold your bino's at arms length away and look in the eye pieces, if the circle of light is small, small exit pupil. Bino's for night use have larger exit pupils.

I have an 8" SCT telescope, but I still use my 8x56's for quick stuff and wide field views.

How are the ones you picked up? They are not bad. Its a Vivitar 7x55. They cost me only $5. I certanly see stars that I can't see with my eyes alone.

I dug out my old star charts and bought a flash light and some mozzie repellent and plan to go back out tonight since I have tomorrow off work. I just hope the clouds clear out.

[XabbaRus]

I bought my telescope at the wrong time.

Beginning of summer, which where I live means it never gets really dark. Darkest time is a 2am.

Also the weather has been rubbish, very cloudy.

I definitely will be keeping August 27th in my diary and pray the clouds go away. I just ordered myself a 2X Barlow which with the stock 10mm and 25mm eyepieces will help a lot.

Also got a T-Adaptor and T-ring for a Nikon so I can take my dads D90 and use that.

So for the time being I have been making do with using the internet to learn about the constellations.

[Gerald]

I bought my telescope at the wrong time.

Beginning of summer, which where I live means it never gets really dark. Darkest time is a 2am.

Also the weather has been rubbish, very cloudy.

I definitely will be keeping August 27th in my diary and pray the clouds go away. I just ordered myself a 2X Barlow which with the stock 10mm and 25mm eyepieces will help a lot.

Also got a T-Adaptor and T-ring for a Nikon so I can take my dads D90 and use that.

So for the time being I have been making do with using the internet to learn about the constellations. where it's never dark this time of year,But you can experience the Northern Lights,not so bad.Anyway they where links to interesting places, as we should have "if we used the Amazon" what has happened to them :hmm2:

[TLAM Strike]

I definitely will be keeping August 27th in my diary and pray the clouds go away. That is Mars closest approach right? Lucky. All the cool stuff in summer is in daylight over here. :(

Don't forget we got the Perseids coming up next week. :03:


So for the time being I have been making do with using the internet to learn about the constellations.Same here. My plan is to learn and locate two or three interesting stars a night weather permitting. Tonight is Nu Draco, and Epsilon Lyra.

[Skybird]

when I was a young boy, a microscope and a telescope were dreams of mine. The microscope, though a bad one, became true, and we had an according hobby course at school, too, which was cool. The telescope still is a dream, but I wonder if it makes sense for me to try to realise it now. I think not, although i could do it now:

I have a balcony, even a calm one, nevertheless my place is relatively close to the city, with unfavourable street and house entrance lights nearby. Transporting such a thing on bike is - probably it turns it into a medium sized expedition. And light pollution in general is a problem these days.

I also wonder in how far it makes sense, if you are not really after just the experience of tactile manipulation of a small telescope. the number of opbjects that are available in virtual sky simulations like WorldWideTelescope is so immense that you could browse, move and zoom the material like in Google Earth for hours and days, getting images from much more professional setups. If you compare that to what you can get with affordable hobby telescopes, even if they are 200/1000 Newtons for example, I think kind of dissapointment is kind of preprogrammed.

These sites below are in German, but the headlines of each section identify the telescope's type and focus, and you can easily get a good impression of what kind of image you can expect from Saturn, Jupiter and Deep Sky objects if you use the various optics. This material helped me tremendously to decide that maybe i must not try to turn every childhood dream into reality, just to risk that the dream bursts in dissappointment. I feel gifted indeed that there is this plenty of picture material available via the internet, so much of professional material is formed up and glued together to create virtual skies to explore where you get the fascinating images that make your eyes go wide in awe. I again recommend to check Microsoft'S WordWideTelescope. It works like Google Earth, just for the sky, and when you (smoothly) zoom in, you get dozens of different optics from different sources, observatories, satellites, and from different sensor types, whiczh you can combine in one pic. I am currently somewhat training to make best use of this extremely powerful and impressive tool. It is one of the biggest discoveries i ever made in the internet, and it really frees me of any desire to buy a telescope.

I have a good 9X63 night-bino for hunters, however. :)

Telescope comparisons:
Jupiter: http://www.binoviewer.at/beobachtungspraxis/teleskopvergleich_jupiter.htm
Saturn: http://www.binoviewer.at/beobachtungspraxis/teleskopvergleich_saturn.htm
Deep Sky: http://www.binoviewer.at/beobachtungspraxis/teleskopvergleich_deepsky.htm

Worldwide Telescope: http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/Home.aspx (take one of their tours for introduction! try webclient first, if you mistrust the installation!)

I anyhow must admit, that live observation is not what I am after, anyway. My interest in astronomy is to fresh up the basics I have learned long time ago and partially have forgotten again, and then go a bit deeper into a more academic approach on things, it is not the image part I am so much interested in, but the learning-the-stuff side of things, and the I-just-want-to-know-and-I-want-to-know-it-reasonably-well. My self-study project will keep me busy for several months to come, judging by the size of the book, the ammount of online material for the book, and the time I see I need to work through the first 40 pages and making according notes and really learning the matter by repetitions. So far I enjoy it tremendously. Once i am finished i so far plan to focus even deeper on sub-branches like astro pohysics and cosmology, maybe, or to embark on an accoridng self study for physics, at least some branches of it. I want to go one level higher than the wide range of quite good popular science books that vare available (like Hawkins has published them, Peat or Davis, but I also depend on the mathematical formalisations not beeing exaggerated - much more than just school math I find difficult to follow. It is not easy to find books on quantum and particle physics or relativity that match these criterions. So far I have found just one, on relativity, and that was more a school-level book. I also need it in German - the last thing when struggling with math and new concepots is to fight a battle with scientific English at the sideline. After all, I do it as a hobby only and want to get at least a bit of fun from it. :) The astronomy book, however, so far is fun pure.

My difficulty with higher maths has kept me away from ever considering to study physics at university seriously. More than the popular science books, but less than the university courses, math light, please, and as little as possible - that is what I need. Maybe the matter forbids that this criterion can be fulfilled. I found academical physics books to be awfully crowded with math.

Oh, I also have started to recapitulate school math, btw, and go a bit further than that. Just a bit. :)

[Skybird]

Hubble Deep Field - if this does not give you a shiver, let yourself bury, for you are probably already dead. :DL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcBV-cXVWFw

[Platapus]

Hubble Deep Field - if this does not give you a shiver, let yourself bury, for you are probably already dead. :DL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcBV-cXVWFw

That. Is. One. Cool. Video.

Everything we know and think we know is practically nothing compared to the Universe.

[frau kaleun]

Everything we know and think we know is practically nothing compared to the Universe.

And the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force. :yep:

:O:

Seriously, though, I used to be way into astronomy when I was younger. My father bought a telescope from the Sears catalogue (remember those?) right around the time I started school IIRC. He was always a man of insatiable curiosity but I think the purchase was probably inspired by the Apollo 11 moon landing which would have happened shortly before then... I can remember being allowed to stay up past my usual bedtime if anything about it was on TV and he and I watched the coverage religiously. It's probably my first memory of anything that happened on a larger stage than my own little childhood world of home and family and close friends.

Looking back I'm sure it wasn't that great of a 'scope but you could see Saturn's rings and the big moons of Jupiter with it - amazing stuff for a kid my age to get a look at, sure enough. And it made looking at our own moon a whole new experience.

Even as an adult I've sometimes stood outside and looked at the moon and really thought about the fact that, at one time, there were human beings just like me up there walking around looking back at us. I mean, just... realized it, by which I mean made it real to the core of my being, not just as some "historical fact" of great importance. I don't quite know how to explain it, but there's a point where doing that really starts to blow my mind, for lack of a better phrase.

I used to do a lot of stargazing when I was still living at my family home, which (at the time) was far enough out "in the country" to make that possible without the interference of nighttime urban/suburban lighting. Can't really do it where I live now, although on clear, moonless nights I can still find some of the brighter celestial objects. Orion, in particular, feels like an old friend whenever I see him.

Still have a small collection of astronomy/physics/astrophysics books on the shelf but it's been a while since I meandered back into that area of interest. I imagine I'll get there again eventually, at the very least it's too tied up with nostalgia and the happier memories of my childhood to stay on the periphery forever.

[TLAM Strike]

Seriously, though, I used to be way into astronomy when I was younger. My father bought a telescope from the Sears catalogue (remember those?) right around the time I started school IIRC. He was always a man of insatiable curiosity but I think the purchase was probably inspired by the Apollo 11 moon landing which would have happened shortly before then... I can remember being allowed to stay up past my usual bedtime if anything about it was on TV and he and I watched the coverage religiously. It's probably my first memory of anything that happened on a larger stage than my own little childhood world of home and family and close friends. Its sad we have lost that spectacle of space travel. What do people my age (25) have to remember? If they are a little older they remember the Challenger. Most my age will remember the Columbia. All tragedies. Most will forget the probes that landed on Mars and Titan, there is just something about a human standing on alien soil saying "we came in peace for all mankind" that inspires us to greatness. :cry:

Well outside I go with my binocs...

[Gerald]

Its sad we have lost that spectacle of space travel. What do people my age (25) have to remember? If they are a little older they remember the Challenger. Most my age will remember the Columbia. All tragedies. Most will forget the probes that landed on Mars and Titan, there is just something about a human standing on alien soil saying "we came in peace for all mankind" that inspires us to greatness. :cry:

Well outside I go with my binocs... absolute dark there,at home too many lights and candles Good luck :up:

[frau kaleun]

Its sad we have lost that spectacle of space travel. What do people my age (25) have to remember? If they are a little older they remember the Challenger. Most my age will remember the Columbia. All tragedies. Most will forget the probes that landed on Mars and Titan, there is just something about a human standing on alien soil saying "we came in peace for all mankind" that inspires us to greatness. :cry:

My dad and I were both space program geeks.

We had family friends who lived in Florida, between Orlando and the Atlantic coast. We used to visit there at least once a year. One time we went down to Cape Canaveral and took the tour of the KSC. At the time they were working on preparation for the first space shuttle mission - we were taken out on the runway they'd put down there in case the shuttle needed to land at KSC - but of course all the Apollo stuff I recognized was still around... mission control, the Vehical Assembly Building (if you think it looks big on TV, you should see it in person!) and it was totally awesome.

The space exploration exhibit at the MSI in Chicago is also very cool. When I went pretty much all I looked at was that and the U-505... I mean, I stood this close to the actual Apollo 8 command module. How awesome is that?

[TLAM Strike]

absolute dark there,at home too many lights and candles Good luck :up: Thanks. My neighbor was cooking out side and had their lights on so I cut my time short. I didn't want to bother then and tell them to turn out their lights.

But I did make out the double star Epsilon Lyra. Looked like a long stain in the sky next to Vega but I could just barely make out the separate points of light.

I also saw a meteor (biggest I've seen in a while) and a satellite. The latter shined really brightly for a moment- I guess it was its solar panels reflecting the light. interestingly they crossed paths (from my perspective at least)... makes me wonder if someone was taking a shot at it. :D

My dad and I were both space program geeks.

We had family friends who lived in Florida, between Orlando and the Atlantic coast. We used to visit there at least once a year. One time we went down to Cape Canaveral and took the tour of the KSC. At the time they were working on preparation for the first space shuttle mission - we were taken out on the runway they'd put down there in case the shuttle needed to land at KSC - but of course all the Apollo stuff I recognized was still around... mission control, the Vehical Assembly Building (if you think it looks big on TV, you should see it in person!) and it was totally awesome.

The space exploration exhibit at the MSI in Chicago is also very cool. When I went pretty much all I looked at was that and the U-505... I mean, I stood this close to the actual Apollo 8 command module. How awesome is that? When I was in school (5th grade) we went to a place in the city called the "Challenger Learning Center". Basically we got to play astronaut for a day flying a pretend mission. One group was mission control and the other was the crew after a while we switched. We had to communicate information back and forth and perform science experiments. I remember my task was to analyze the fake moon rocks and track the orbit of the space craft on the "Big Board".

Also once at the air show I got to see a demonstration of the heat tiles from the shuttle. A person from NASA was there and put some kind of torch to it till it glowed. I think met some people who flew aboard the shuttle at one point but I was really little at the time.

[Gerald]

Thanks. My neighbor was cooking out side and had their lights on so I cut my time short. I didn't want to bother then and tell them to turn out their lights.

But I did make out the double star Epsilon Lyra. Looked like a long stain in the sky next to Vega but I could just barely make out the separate points of light.

I also saw a meteor (biggest I've seen in a while) and a satellite. The latter shined really brightly for a moment- I guess it was its solar panels reflecting the light. interestingly they crossed paths (from my perspective at least)... makes me wonder if someone was taking a shot at it. :D


I really hope so that we may be able to post it here would be cool,we can really see the amazing things sometimes,I remember when I saw my first satellites,so far but so fast also,and in the Universe is nothing, to our sun, it takes "only 8 light minutes,it says a lot of the distance we can talk about! :DL

[Platapus]

One of my favourite movie quotes about the space program is from "Apollo 13"

Tom Hanks says

From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. And it's not a miracle, we just decided to go.

We just decided to go. :yeah:

[Skybird]

Its sad we have lost that spectacle of space travel. What do people my age (25) have to remember? If they are a little older they remember the Challenger. Most my age will remember the Columbia. All tragedies. Most will forget the probes that landed on Mars and Titan, there is just something about a human standing on alien soil saying "we came in peace for all mankind" that inspires us to greatness. :cry:

There are the probes on Mars, but I think what impresses younger people today the most is the huge library of pictures we got of Deep Space objects. To me these are the spectacle of today.

Astronomy is a spectacle that is hierarchically structured: Star System in galaxies in local groups in superclusters in the cosmic web. The dimensions are unimaginable, and better than using numbers to learn aboiut them is to try to grasp them in scaled analogies. However, the fascination does not end up there: in the reverse direction, into the small, again you are being confronted with these incredible relations between small and smaller objects and atoms and subnuclear particles - and the unbelievable ammount of empty space between them.

Carl Sagan said: "We are all made of star stuff". He meant that the atoms we are made of all have been recycled several times already in the nuclear fusuin of emerging stars at the beginning of their lives, or the nuclear reaction when stars died. I would say additionally to him: "We, and everything that is, are all made of nothing but empty void." We are just forms without substance. We are dreams, shadows of images and ideas. Potentials. Why do I think of probability clouds now, like they use the term in particle physics when they say farewell to the idea of material smallest objects and startb to think of them as abstract "tendencies to be" only? :)

The Ultra Deep Field photo by Hubble is commented by the author with something like that the universe is 78 billion lightyears across. but do not be mistaken, since light travels one lightyear in distance per year (= ~9.5x10^12 km), we cannot see anything that is beyond the range of around 15 billion lightyears, since that is the estimated age of the universe. The observable universe thus cannot be greater than 2x14 billion lightyears (= ~2.6x10^23 km) and this only when we sit right in the "middle" of it. what the author points at are models concluded on by examining background radiation, that indicate that the universe actually does not end at the border to which we can see, but that it continues beyond that. Other values mentioned even consider 150+ billion lightyears as size if the total universe, but most of it we just cannot see since light has had no time to get from there to us. And it is still expanding! So, the real great unknown, I mean: the really real unknown :) - does not begin earlier than 14 billion lightyears away from us!

And if then considering that the further away we look, the more we look back in time and do not see present, but past - in 14 billion lightyears distance we see it how things looked 14 billion years ago, but we still do so by staying in our present - then it really becomes mindbogging and one looses interest to think in words anymore, isn't it like this? At least that's how it is for me.

And maybe in that moment something happens indeed, that something like a cycle gets completed, when the space in the atoms and the space in the universe finally return back to the witness perceiving these dimensions and link up again with the inner space that is this witness' mind reflecting over it. The space "out there" and the inner space in us - maybe the only difference between it is our thought, to use an analogy: like the surface of a bubble is the only thing that separates it's inner void from the outer void in which it floats.

It's all just a dream within a dream within a dream. Mind dancing with it's own imaginations. Can one dare to imagine that maybe "exploration of space" also is "exploration of mind", and that "exploration of mind" means "exploration of space"? I never was able to ignore this intriguing thought.

[Skybird]

That empty space and void stuff made me thinking.

I did some mathematical gameplay to see how much of the total universe we possibly could see if we compare the size of the observable universe to that of the total universe.

Let's use rounded values, it's good enough for our purposes: 1 lightyear ly = 300,000 km (3x10^5); all fractions rounded to just one decimal. We also assume that the universe(s) has the shape of a perfect sphere.

To get a first idea: how many cubic kilometers does 1 cubic lightyear hold? The term is defined by convention not to cover the volume of a sphere, but a cube. So, when 1 ly = 9.5 x 10^12 km, then multiplying this value three times with itself gives a result of

1 ly^3 = 9. 5x10^38 km^3

Now to the volume size of the different universes we have. We scale that in cubic lightyears. I base on the idea that when we can look 14 billion lightyears into every direction, then this distance is not the total diameter but the radius of a spheric observable universe.

We have three universes we want to compare to each other: the observable universe (2x14=28 billion lightyears in diamter, and two different estimations for the size of the total universe, as mentioned earlier: 78 billion and 150 billion lightyears in diameter.

The formula to calculate the colume of spheres is this:

v = (4/3) r^3 pi; r being the radius.

The observable universe has a radius of 1.4x10^13 lightyears. We enter that into the formula. We get a result of

1.1x10^40 ly^3 -> observable universe

The total universe if it is 78 billion ly in diameter. First we must devide it by 2 to get the radius, then we use the formula again. The result is:

2.5x10^41 ly^3 -> total universe with d=78 billion ly

And the size of a universe with 150 billion ly in diameter:

1.8x10^42 ly^3 -> total universe with d=150 billion ly

Now we compare the volumes by using percentage calculation. We find that if

the total universe is 150 billion ly in diameter, then the observable universe covers a volume of just 0.6% of that. That means the other 99.4% of the total universe we cannot see because in a universe of the age of 14 billion years, light has had no time to travel from there to here.

If the total universe is smaller and "just" 78 billion lightyears across, then it still is only 4.4% of the total universe that we can ever hope to see. 95.6% will remain hidden to us, always.

Now mind you that the universe is expanding. The most distant galaxies we can see move away from us with almost the speed of light. Go figure. For us humans, however, it does not make a difference, because we simply will not exist long enough as if the difference in size of the universe will make a difference to us regarding the values above for how much of the universe we can see.

Estimations say there are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe alone. If we scale our galaxy down to 1 cm, and the Andromeda galaxy also (it compares in size to ours), both would be around 25 cm apart in that scaling. If our galaxy were a football field, then our sun would be an object so small you would need a microscope to see it. the next star to our sun would be around 4 mm away, Alpha Centauri. The ratio between space and the soze of stars and voids and the size of galaxies is such that the probability of galaxies colliding is much greater than that of stars in a galaxy colliding with each other - and this although the abuss between galaxies is so very much bigger in dimension than that between stars. In the voyage scale model http://www.jeffreybennett.com/voyage_scale.html
they have build on a mall in the US, they visualised the solar system like this: they set up scaled models of the planets in straight line in correct relatiove distances. the sun has the size of a grapefruit, the earth is an object the soze of the tip of a ball pencil, 15 m away. Jupiter has the soize of a small marble. Pluto, back then still counted as a planet, is 600 meters away. the next star system, Alpha Centauri, would be 4 thousand kilometers away: or one trvael distance from the american West coast to the East coast. As I read a joke in a book: what astromers do when looking at other planets is they find a grapefruit that is 4000 km (and high factors of that) away and then identify an object the size of a ballpencil's tip circiling around it just some centimeters or meters away. :D

If you ask what the solar system is, then the best reply I think is possible is this: it is nothing but empty space.

Want to talk of "space travel", anyone? the term is a hopeless euphemism, i think. :)

Sunday morning. Some people go to church, I do this stuff instead. The delight found might be the same. :)

[Platapus]

It is a bummer that it is almost a certainty that humans will never be able to explore the entire universe (and anything beyond of course). It is just too big. :nope:

[Diopos]

...
It is just too big. :nope:

Nah. It is us who are small....:hmmm:


.

[SteamWake]

How we arrive at the unit of measurement known as 1 year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhqzW97_47w&feature=player_embedded#!

[XabbaRus]

Skybird I have looked at the Worl Wide Telescope, only thing is you have to install silverlight..

I do agree you get to see amazing stuff but having a telescope you get the thrill of seeing it for real.

I have a 130mm Newtonian and even where I live with a few streelights near by I was blown away when I found Saturn and could see the rings an moons and that was when I was only at 65X magnification.

If you need to cycle somewhere then a refractor would probably be the best to get. The problem isn't the tube but the tripod. They are a pain in the backside.

[Skybird]

Skybird I have looked at the Worl Wide Telescope, only thing is you have to install silverlight..


Is this so - well, I had Silverlight installed before, and thus did not recognise it is needed for WWT also. However, that should be no porblen, I am not aware of any problems with Silverlight. It is something like a downtuned .NET environment which also never has given me any reasons for concerns, I think it was Google Earth depending on .NET. So in all honesty I only can say: Silverlight should not cause any fears. If there is problematic stuff going on with it, I am not aware of it, nor are my scanners.

Anyhow, youtube has many videos available for or from or about it.

It is in principle a planetarium, wehre zooming into any given point of the sky gives you access to the giant database of professional images from satellites, observatories, and different sensors types that - oin photographic quality that you do not see in standard planetarium software. These ics are the real stuff, the real pics they have shot at, the software is kind of a very clever user itnerfae to access the database much like you access the database of Google earth photography. In a given image, you also have the option to choose amongst the availably image so9urces, sensor types, and combine different images of the given object, if the database hold according photography. So, opyu zoom to the thing you want to look at, you choose amongst the variety of satellites and obsrvatopries that attributed images to that objct, you choose the image type you want to get (visual, infrared, x-ray, etc), and there you are. So, it does much more than Google Earth does. It gives you your own supertelescope, so tpo speak, and you can do with it and look at what ever you want. It is your entrance ticket into the biggest database of astronomic photography that I know of. They also jave many tours, that are preprogrammed shows for edcuational purproses for example, like oyu know it from Celestia, for example - just that this is done much more professionally and visually much more stunning, offering more options. you can also program your own tours.

I understand your love for your telescope, Xabba, it reminds me of the fascination I felt when having that microscope back then. but I also saw the big difference between that cheap thing - and the laboratory microscopes we had at school back then (early 80s). Microscope cpurses where just once a week, so on the other days I stayed with what I had, since there was no virtual microscope on no internet, and since I had training almost every day I had little time anyway.

[XabbaRus]

I've tried World Wide telescope and it is amazing.

I have been trying to learn stuff using star maps for now.

What I'm really needing is a clear night.

[XabbaRus]

Still have a small collection of astronomy/physics/astrophysics books on the shelf but it's been a while since I meandered back into that area of interest. I imagine I'll get there again eventually, at the very least it's too tied up with nostalgia and the happier memories of my childhood to stay on the periphery forever.


Frau, any chance you could list the books you have? I'll then check them out. cheers.

[frau kaleun]

Frau, any chance you could list the books you have? I'll then check them out. cheers.

Moon Shot - Alan Shepard & Deke Slayton
Lost Moon - Jim Lovell & Jeffrey Kluger
'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!' - Richard Feynman
Six Easy Pieces - Richard Feynman
The Meaning Of It All - Richard Feynman
About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - Paul Davies
Lonely Hearts Of The Cosmos - Dennis Overbye
Coming Of Age In The Milky Way - Timothy Ferris
The Whole Shebang: A State Of The Universe Report - Timothy Ferris
A Brief History Of Time - Stephen Hawking
Cosmos - Carl Sagan
Connecting With The Cosmos - Donald Goldsmith
Atlas Of The Night Sky - ed., Storm Dunlop

I've only read about half of these and that was ages ago so take that into consideration. I do remember enjoying the first Ferris one, which is why I bought the second, still unread. The Sagan book is the companion volume to the PBS series, probaby still worth a look despite its age since IIRC it deals a bit with the long history of the sciences involved. I also remember reading some other stuff of his but I either never owned the books or have lost possession of them over the years.

Lost Moon is a must for an Apollo program geek. Richard Feynman is, IMO, always a worthwhile read. And I think one of those books deals somewhat with his investigation into the Challenger disaster.

The Atlas was something I picked up as a stargazing reference, I'm sure there are many such books available and they can be very handy. It may be meant more for naked eye observers though.