Click to Enlarge "The Brightest Stars" by Fred Schaaf. Published by Wiley.

Yesterday I went to a Borders bookshop in Perth, Western Australia and a purchased a copy of The Brightest Stars by Fred Schaaf. It cost me AU$30.99 and it is a really good book. It contains information on the 20 brightest stars.

Features

• Chapters on the 20 brightest stars that contains detailed information about their movement across the heavens.
• Chapters on the names, magnitudes, movements, structure, distances, and life and death of stars.
• Explains ‘Seeing stars better’ which includes averted vision, information about transparency and light pollution.
• Tables in the back of the book that includes information on colour, spectral type, surface temperature, apparent and absolute magnitude, distance, position, culminations, motions, diameter and masses for each of the 20 brightest stars.
• Detailed star lore on each star.

Pros

• Written by an author of Sky and Telescope who has also written 12 other astronomy books.
• Detailed information on each star.
• Illustrations that show the stars size comparative to Earth.
• Very informative for low price.

Cons

• May be hard on newcomers to Astronomy.
• Some stars have less information than other stars.
• Star charts for northern users.
  

Review by Sean Liddelow (seanliddelow). Discuss this review on the IceInSpace Forum.