A brief but endearing explanation of why we should all live in wonder at our universe. Click below for the full review.
Review: The Amateur Astronomer's Journal
I have a very specific memory of when I first fell in love with the stars. I had been reading a book about outer space in the school library, and it was likely the first (and far from the last) science book that I had ever opened. Young as I was, I didn't really understand even the basic text that explained elliptical orbits or why the Orion Nebula looks the way it does. But the pictures! As anyone who keeps up with Nasa's Astronomy Picture of the Day website can tell you, space - though so often empty - is hauntingly beautiful, if you know where to look. And that's the trick.
A few days after that, my family was driving back home from a visit to my great-grandmother in Ayr. It was getting late into the night, and the Ayrshire skies became dark as we got away from the town lights. And the stars went beyond beauty. I had seen them so many times before, and suddenly they had eternal depth, the great gulf between them a far-reaching vale that covered the endless wonders of the Milky Way and a hundred billion galaxies beyond it. And there were probably some aliens out there too.
I recall this story because The Amateur Astronomer's Journal brought it right to the front of my mind, and it stayed there while I went through the roughly 25 (greyscale illustrated) pages by Scots drawer-of-things Neil Slorance. The story and the art are both minimalist, so that the book can get right to the heart of the matter. A young woman, fed up with her job, heads out of the city at night with her father's telescope to view the stars. What follows is a brief, yet oddly touching, lesson on the structure of the universe, and puts forward the case for taking a bit of time to appreciating the night sky. The grandeur and intricacy of the stars deserve it, as the happiness of the character requires it. I very much enjoyed the human aspect being intertwined with the astrophysics, pulling you along through the pages on a personal journey as well as a galactic one.
And as the simple but earnest and expressive art shows how small we are in all this, it takes care to say that we needn't necessarily think of that as a bad thing. There's a good lesson here: as big as the world is, it's a little place for all of us, and none of us are really all that far from all the others. You can take from that what you will.
The Amateur Astronomer's Journal is short, but it's as long as it needs to be to tell its story and get its point across. For a scant ~£3, I would definitely say it's worth a few whimsical minutes of your life, especially to see if it stirs anything in you or to introduce young children to science. A Briefer History of Time would be a good followup for adults to get an in-depth but mostly accessible look at all the fascinating physics that we take for granted. And frankly, I now find myself wanting one of these. What wonderful worlds we have.
In the interest of full disclosure, a review copy was provided by Alice Crook, a friend of the artist and an onomastician. For a name-researcher she has a big habit of introducing me to truly awesome science things.
* Update * 07-08-2013 15:47
Check out how you can spot exoplanets at home using your own telescope and free software from Nasa!
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