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J. Brit. Astron. Assoc., 110, 3, 2000, p.165
Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-521-63280-3. Pp ix + 336, £19.95 (hbk).
reviewed by Richard McKim
Michael Bakich is a planetarium consultant, eclipse tour guide, and author of CUP's Cambridge Guide to the Constellations. The new Cambridge Planetary Handbook purports to be 'comprehensive' and 'extensively illustrated'. The colour cover is misleading: that is as far as the colour goes.
Part 1 (80 pages) comprises useful lists of data which contain both predictable (orbital speeds, albedo, distances) and less predictable (origin of names, interesting conjunctions) entries. This is most valuable. Part 2, most of the rest of the book, consists of a chapter per major planet. These chapters open with more data, then a general summary. Bakich has done well with the very old historical material, and using the collections of the Linda Hall Library (the only source ever referred to!) he has extracted some rare and interesting illustrations. But ten pages are wasted with uncredited redrawn portraits of astronomers. The modern-day descriptions of each object are also good, but the treatment becomes unbalanced and sometimes misleading when he fails to bridge the gap between the 17th and 21st centuries.
Thus no attempt is made to explain how Schiaparelli might have derived 88 days instead of 59 days for the rotational period of Mercury, and telescopically speaking we never get beyond Lowell's canals on Mars: there is no attempt to describe how that hypothesis was broken down by others. From the 1890s we leap to Orson Welles' spoof radio broadcast of 1938, and suddenly we are in the spacecraft age, and examining martian meteorites (though the historical timelines at the end of the chapters introduce a few other intervening events or facts). Notwithstanding the above, some of the 'asides' in the chapters are very interesting. Thus the author mentions other satellites of the Moon, intramercurial planets, the great lunar hoax, etc.
The choice of illustrations is very wide-ranging but a little quirky. The gap between the ancient and modern is as abrupt in the illustrations as it is in the text. There are none of the superb Earth-based photographs or CCD (or HST!) images from the 20th century at all. Why not? As it stands there is an apparent 'imagination leap' between the telescopic data and the spacecraft images: in reality this was not the case. Some illustrations were new to me: it was interesting to see Angelo Secchi's drawings of Jupiter, for example, as they appeared in the defunct German periodical Sirius.
After Part 2, there are some biographies of astronomers, and a useful glossary. A casual reading showed some misprints in the book, but not many. Though an interesting work, with lots of data, black and white pictures and numerous anecdotes, I feel that the book is unbalanced and incomplete as a whole, and as such I do not really recommend it to readers. If you have £20 to spend, buy something else.
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