Lessons from the Masters Book Review

Lessons from the Masters is an astrophotography book from Springer. Each chapter is written by different well known astrophotographers. It is good to have individual chapters, as it makes it nice to pick up the book and just read one chapter at a time.

There really is something for everyone in this book, whether you are into solar imaging, lunar photography, widefield SLR imaging, planetary imaging or deep sky imaging.

It took me a while to read the book cover to cover, but I did begin reading the chapters I found most interesting first. I then seemed to randomly pick chapters one at a time and read them.

I began with Damian Peach’s chapter about planetary imaging. Now I think his images are amazing, and I am sure there is something he does, that he is not telling us. Unfortunately I thought he could have told us some more about what he does exactly when he images. I felt the chapter was a little bit too much of an overview.

‘Lessons from the Masters’ begins with a great chapter on the theory of astronomical imaging which includes lots of equations and graphs discussing signal to noise ratio, full width at half maximum, quantum efficiency, sampling and calibration etc.

Then there are a number of chapters covering different areas of astro imaging from authors that include Tony Hallas, Don Goldman, Ken Crawford, Damian Peach and Robert Gendler.

Lessons from the masters chapters:

• High Dynamic Range Processing
• Intensifying Colour
• Revealing small scale details
• Bringing out faint large scale structure
• Narrowband imaging
• Widefield imaging
• Noise reduction techniques
• Deep Sky Imaging workflow
• High resolution lunar and planetary imaging
• Secrets to successful earth and sky photography
• Imaging and processing images of the solar corona
• Catching sunlight
• Aesthetics and composition in deep sky imaging
• Hybrid images: A strategy for optimising impact in astronomical images

It’s nice to see colour images throughout the book. Some of the chapters you can just read through and others are chapters that you will need to sit at your computer and work through in programs like Photoshop.

There are some great tips throughout ‘Lessons from the Masters’, I think everybody will get something out of it. It is nice that ‘Lessons from the Masters’ is a new book (published in 2013), and not an imaging book that is 10 years old. I think your astro imaging will improve after reading this book.

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Observer’s Guide to Star Clusters Book Review

Observer’s Guide to Star Clusters by Mike Inglis

This book is part of the Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series, and it is a book which is organised by constellation. This is actually a good way to organise a book as it allows you to locate the positions of important star clusters in the 88 constellations from anywhere on Earth.

The constellation maps in the book are in black and white, this may not sound so great, but it does allow you to read the maps by the light of a red LED torch or reading light. The clusters themselves and their names or numbers are printed in bold black, against a ‘greyed-out’ background of stars and constellation figures.

The Observer’s Guide to Star Clusters book begins with an introduction to star clusters, which includes how they star clusters are classified, how to record your observations, a full list of the constellations and which constellations will be on show at certain times of the year.

A typical page of the Observer’s Guide to Star Clusters gives you fast facts about the constellation such as its abbreviation, genitive name, it’s translation e.g. Andromedae means Princess of Ethiopia, its visible latitudes, and it’s culmination date.

Then within that constellation the book lists the star clusters in turn providing the reader with the catalogue name that the star cluster is listed in, RA and Dec co-ordinates, the visual magnitude, the approximate number of stars in the cluster, the concentration class and finally the level of difficulty to finding it. There is then a small description about the cluster by the author.

The index at the rear of the book lists each star cluster by its catalogue name, so for example by its NGC or Messier number.

When I first flicked through the book, I felt a bit let down by the endless lists and black and white constellation map drawings, but I can see how this book will help out the astronomer who wants to locate both easy and hard to find star clusters – a lot of which are NGC numbers. It is very handy to have the book ordered by constellation – that I love, the only thing that could be improved here are the star maps. Overall, the Observer’s Guide to Star Clusters is a useful astronomy title.

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Lunar Rover Users Manual Book Review

The Haynes Lunar Rover Owners’ Workshop Manual contains a foreword by Apollo 15 Commander David R Scott.

This Haynes Lunar Rover users manual covers the Lunar Rover from 1971-1972 and tells the complete story of the lunar vehicle that cost over $38 million to manufacture. It begins with early drawings, all the way to the Rover in use on the Apollo missions.

The Lunar Rover, the most expensive car in history.

This book really does bring together a great number of images never really seen before in one place. This is such an interesting book, which contains some early science fiction drawings and actual early NASA drawings of what the lunar rover could have looked like. There are even details on a lunar motorbike that was also developed at the same time as the lunar rover.

The Lunar Rover made the most of the EVAs, by taking the astronauts further than they had ever been before across the lunar landscape. The book includes the maps of where the LRVs went and what occurred.

The nice thing about the lunar rover users manual book is that you will also find a good range of lunar images with the rover in the background. The 3 rovers are still on the lunar surface 40 years later.

The book contains some really good cross sectional diagrams of certain areas of the lunar rover, as well as early test shots of the rover in action.

If you are interested in the Moon and the lunar landings, then get this Haynes book on the lunar rovers, you will not regret it.

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International Space Station Workshop Manual Book Review

This is another excellent Haynes astronomy manual. Haynes has produced several astronomy titles including the Lunar Module and the Space Shuttle.
The author David Baker worked with NASA on the Gemini, Apollo and Shuttle programme between 1965 and 1990. His work has put him in good stead to write this ISS book.

Don’t worry this is not like a Ford Fiesta Haynes manual which tells you how to service your car, so it will not tell you how to build or service your own ISS. But this book does contain everything you would ever want to know about the ISS, including a lot of very good cross sectional diagrams.

The International Space Station book contains over 300 images and technical illustrations. The ISS book takes you all the way through the history of the ISS and charting its creation from how it was built on Earth and then assembled in orbit.

The International Space Station manual begins with an introduction, then there is a chapter called ‘a permanent place in space’, then ‘phase one mission to Mir’, ‘phase two assembly’, ‘phase three permanent habitation’, ‘phase four final assembly’ and a ‘legacy’ chapter.

The Haynes International Space Station book has some really great colour images in it. It’s great to find out how each part was added to the ISS. If you are interested in the ISS then this really should be a book you should get.

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Cambridge Photographic Moon Atlas Book Review

The Cambridge Photographic Moon Atlas covers 69 regions of the lunar landscape in large format images with corresponding charts. The book itself contains 388 high-resolution photographs of the lunar surface.

The Cambridge Photographic Moon Atlas is not just an atlas though, the book begins with a great data section on the moon and the introduction section covers the structure of the moon, chemical composition, the moon evolution, determining the age of craters, changes to the moon by erosion and topography.

There are a few pages on how to best observe the moon, descriptions about libration, there is also information on what telescopes to use as well as photographic observational techniques. This includes the best type of CCD cameras, mounts, filters and telescopes to use. There is even a page on how to process your lunar images using AviStack or Registax.

After the 30 page introduction the book takes you through all sections of the moon. The book is divided into easy to read sections, regions with more features get more pages and more ‘zoomed-in’ detailed pages.

Each feature of the lunar surface is nicely labelled with sections having good descriptions and lunar co-ordinates of where to find them. There are even measurements of a lot of the lunar features such as the diameter of craters in km.

Each section also shows you the feature at various times of the month, so you can see the multiple lighting of the feature of the surface.

The Cambridge Photographic Moon Atlas is a great moon atlas and very up to date with each image looking very impressive. If you are looking for a moon atlas book, also have a look at The Clementine Moon Atlas. That is a very similar book which has images and a chart for each lunar region. It also has more labels on each section.

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