Primer for Star Gazers: How to Find Any Visible Star at Any Hour of the Night

By Henry M. Neely

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0517671301
• ISBN13: 9780517671306
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Gramercy Publishing Company
• Length: 334 Pages
• Weight: 1.43 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Great book.

I received this book for Christmas as a child in 1960. Back then, the mental geometry needed to compensate for the distortion resulting from projecting a hemisphere onto a plane (like a planisphere) was more than I could handle. This book uses charts that look just like the sky does to the eye, and uses a simple system for guiding the reader as to what direction to face and how high above the horizon to look. Even as a kid, it was easy with this book. Over decades of looking at the sky, including a stint working in a planetarium, I've never found an easier approach than the one taken by Neely. If you haven't learned at least the major constellations, you should. You'll never regret the small effort it will take with this book. And yes, I still have my well-worn copy I received almost 50 years ago.

A Great Place to Start

This book really lives up to its title. The location of constellations and individual stars was confusing to me until I got this book and studied it and took it out on cold winter nights to see Orion, Auriga, Canis Major, Perseus and many of the other great constellations. It wasn't long before I was making sense of those little round constellation maps I never could get the hang of when I was a kid. If your interest in astronomy and star gazing continue you will not need this book eventually but it will always be a reminder of where you began and how much you learned from it in such a short time. Another thing about it that I haven't seen in other astronomy books is the correct pronunciation of the constellations and many of the stars and other galactical wonders like the "Pleiades" (plee-uh- deez) Accent on "plee". This is one of those books you'll always want to keep even after you really don't need it. It makes finding constellations and stars relatively easy. All you need is a clear, dark night with a minimum of light pollution. It also has information about certain stars and constellations. Good book to read to your kids or a scout group around a fire at a campout. Great stories about astonishing things that have been discovered near our position in the galaxy and also further out, much further out.

I'm still a 'Star Gazer' at heart.

Got this book back in 1974 from a family member. For more than 3 year I used this book as a guide to know what was in the sky on almost any given clear night, during all seasons. Thankfully it is a hard cover book or it would be more ragged than it is.