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The Urban Astronomer’s Guide: A Walking Tour of the Cosmos for City Sky Watchers (Patrick Moore’s Practical Astronomy Series) eBook

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SKU: 9781846282164 Categories: ,

This book is a good, basic intro to observing the Moon. But it could have been so much better.

Part I gives an intro to the Moon’s structure, origins and — for lack of a better term — geology. However, the writer is clearly out of his element here, particularly in the discussion of the Moon’s origin. He uses technical terms that are inaccurate — the one point where he talks about some particular lunar lavas being “ductile” sticks in my mind. A co-author — or a good, knowledgeable editor — would help here. The discussions of libration and eclipses are adequate.

Part II is where the book shines. A lot of time has obviously been spent at the eyepiece, viewing the Moon, and this section on observing really shows that. However, even here, we can get fairly pedantic; especially when the author credits himself for photographs, and continues to do so, over and over again.

The book is really lacking in two things:

1) There are no data tables of any kind. Any introduction to a lunar coordinate system in the text, accompanied by a listing of major features and their locations in an appendix, would be very helpful. Just a table of features and days past new when they are best viewed would be a big improvement.
2) As far as this book is concerned, the far side of the Moon does not exist. I do understand that this is supposed to be an observing guide, and we can’t look at it from Earth. But the book includes discussions of the moons of other planets, comets and asteroids, and other topics far less relevant. The fact that the far side doesn’t even appear in the Index will tell you something about how much this is glossed over.

As an amateur astronomer who is mainly a deep-sky observer, the Moon is mostly a target of my scorn. The Moon makes the sky too bright to see the faint objects that I normally look at. I bought this book because I thought it would give me a greater appreciation for something that is normally “just in the way.” To some extent, it has helped; and for that I give it 4 stars. But if I had it to do over again, I would search for a better reference than this.