The Ever-Changing Sky : A Guide to the Celestial Sphere

Rating:
Summary: Excellent reference work, but MISSING pages.
Review: A concise and comprehensive work on astronomy. I'm a casual amateur astronomer, and chose the book for its first ~ six chapters explaining the coordinate system, relative motion and the like. Consequently, I've not read the entire book and use it primarily as a reference. Today, 20 June, I was looking up a topic in the index, p. 137. Went in search of p. 137 and discovered pp. 108-140 are missing. They were not torn out, but simply are not bound in the text. Page 107 has a drawing and the next page is 141. The missing pages include such sections on binary stars, variable stars and the Milky Way galaxy. My book is copyrighted ~ 1995.

Rating:
Summary: A great book to learn astronomy and astrophysics
Review: I am a retired physicist and astronomer and I have seen many textbooks in astronomy, popular as well as written for the serious student, and in more languishes than just English. This book may well be the best, it deserves more than 5 stars. It covers an amazing range: Spherical astronomy, astronomical mechanics and the motions of the heavenly bodies, planetary science, astrophysics, and instruments on just 500 pages. The book even includes atmospheric phenomenons such as sun dogs, halos, rainbows, which are generally omitted in the popular astronomical literature. The author manages to explain with lucid clarity difficult details without any use of mathematics. I checked several rarely well explained points in the field of spherical astronomy and astronomical mechanics and was deeply satisfied. He even touches on astrology and UFOs (in a critical manner). The book has included pictures illustrating facts I knew very well but had never seen so well demonstrated. The author is obviously not only a good scientist he is also a superior lecturer. If you want just one book to explore what you want to know in astronomy and astrophysics you have it here. Since I am teaching astronomy at my local college I will make it my textbook.

Rating:
Summary: Covers many hard to find topics in "cultural astronomy"
Review: I would just like to add one point to the review of Gudzent. In his preface, Kaler explains that one of his reasons for writing the book was that he was teaching a course in astronomy for antrophologist. He's covering a lot of topics about terrestial and planetary motion that is of interest to a wide range of people, but that is often no longer covered in modern astronomy textbooks. If you're interested in a solid background for "cultural astronomy", this is the book for you!