J. Brit. Astron. Assoc., 106, 3, 1996
Cambridge University Press, 1996. ISBN-0-521-38053-7. Pp xix + 495, £24.95 (hbk).
reviewed by Henry Hatfield
The author's intention in writing this book has been to provide a complete non-mathematical treatment of all aspects of the sky, useful not only to those in other professions who need to know these elements of astronomy, but to astronomers as well, whether student, professional, or amateur.
Chapter 1 describes the celestial sphere and its attributes. There follow two chapters on the orbit and movements of the Earth, and four which deal with precession, nutation, aberration, time, sunrise and sunset, and celestial navigation. The planets have their own chapter, as do stars and constellations, the Moon, tides, eclipses and calendars, and asteroids. A final chapter on light and the atmosphere leads to three appendices which contain a set of simple star maps, various graphs and tables, and a detailed section on spherical trigonometry.
The many and excellent diagrams are supplemented with several black and white plates. Formulae have been kept to a minimum in the main text of the book; this does not always help, since the alternative is very often a rather long-winded description of the relevant formula set out in words, which at times is rather muddling. Professor Kaler covers an enormous range of subjects, from the simplest of plane trigonometry in Chapter 1 to very advanced concepts of time in Chapter 8 and the extremely complex perturbations of the Moon's orbit in Chapter 9. His treatment of tides is good, though not entirely comprehensive, and the section on eclipses of the Sun and Moon is excellent. The chapter on the planets is nearly 50 pages long, and includes long (and interesting) diversions into Copernican theory, Kepler's Laws and the properties of conic sections. Your reviewer is not quite so happy about his treatment of astronomical observations at sea. The inexperienced reader might well get the impression that the navigator can determine both his latitude and longitude from one observation to a star; although this is possible in theory, it cannot be done in practice. Again the treatment of position line errors is not good; the observer may or may not lie within the so-called circle of confusion, depending upon the errors of observation.
To sum up, this book would be a rather expensive buy for a 'non-astronomical' researcher just wanting to read up on the basic attributes of the celestial sphere, but it contains many very interesting facts and figures which are certainly not to be found in the average present day book on popular astronomy.
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