Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Part I First discoveries: the adventure begins
- Part 2 Solar system voyages
- Part 3 A deep-sky guide
- Part 4 The night sky on film: astrophotography
- Part 5 Amateur astronomy in the electronic age
- Part 6 The build-it-yourself astronomer
- Appendices
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Part I - First discoveries: the adventure begins
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Part I First discoveries: the adventure begins
- Part 2 Solar system voyages
- Part 3 A deep-sky guide
- Part 4 The night sky on film: astrophotography
- Part 5 Amateur astronomy in the electronic age
- Part 6 The build-it-yourself astronomer
- Appendices
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction: the accessible Universe
A schoolboy once stood in a cornfield at dusk, watching excitedly for the earliest stars to emerge in the evening twilight. His brand new telescope, fixed on top of a fencepost, waited beside him to receive its first starlight.
The boy had christened his little mailorder telescope ‘The Strawberry Spyglass’, because its eighteen-dollar price had cost him weeks of hard work picking strawberries in his father's market garden. It was a simple instrument. With a main lens of only two inches (5 cm) diameter, and a homebuilt mounting that incorporated a stone grinding wheel and an angled structure of wooden struts, the Strawberry Spyglass was, by most amateur astronomers’ standards, very crude indeed. Yet for the boy, whose name was Leslie Peltier, the diminutive two-inch telescope was destined to become his spaceship for an unusually venturesome excursion across the depths of the cosmos.
His first glance at the surface of the Moon was a revelatory experience for Peltier. In his own words: ‘I descended into craters by the score … and down the blinding wall of Aristarchus. One night I walked across the strange and violent gash of the Alpine Valley and … rested briefly in the long shadows of Pico and Piton.’
Soon his telescope had transported him far beyond the Moon. He explored the satellites and cloud belts of Jupiter, the intricacies of Saturn's divided rings and eventually the remote worlds of Uranus and Neptune.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Guide to Amateur Astronomy , pp. 1 - 50Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995