Mike Lynch's Minnesota Star Watch: The Essential Guide to our Night Sky

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful coffee table book.
Review: Mike Lynch is an advanced amateur astronomer, but more than that he is a radio personality and writer of a weekly astronomy column for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, these writing/communications skills have enabled him to write this gorgeous book on astronomy for amateurs. In recent years the advances in astronomy have given to us a most amazing set of pictures. Some come from the Hubble orbiting observatory, some from new huge ground based telescopes. These images have been digitally enhanced and colorized to provide images that only a few years ago were simply impossible to obtain. Mr. Lynch has collected a number of these to illustrate the points he is discussing.

This book is a general introduction to every aspect of astronomy from the thinking of the ancients making up stories about the constellations, to the recent research on the planets such as photographs of the surface of Mars taken from probes actually on the surface.

Oh that Galileo could see this book. Remember that he was put under house arrest for suggesting that moons went around Jupiter rather than everything in the heavens going around Earth and we humans.

This is a delightful coffee table book. And it isn't just for Minnesota. The universe doesn't revolve around Minnesota any more than it does Earth.