Photo: Dan Duriscoe / NPS · Public domain
Not how-to guides. These are the pieces that don’t fit a buying decision — an argument about a planet, the history of a piece of gear, the people who built amateur astronomy out of their houses. Most of these stories are quietly disappearing, and we’d like to write more of them down.
My daughter makes the case for the ninth planet. The 2006 vote that demoted Pluto, what New Horizons actually found — and the children’s book that quietly rewrote its own rhyme to drop it.
The red light in your eyepiece case was invented in 1984 by an astronomer whose flashlight kept dying at 3am — and he’s still building it by hand. The Rigel Systems story, in Dr. Leon Palmer’s own words.
In 1999 I measured one planet crossing one star from my college observatory. There are more than 6,300 known now — and the map of all of them turns out to be a map of where we pointed the telescopes.
Looking for the practical side? The guides cover what to buy and how to observe it, and See Space Now is where the stargazing starts.