Complete Idiot's Guide to Astronomy

I. FINDING OUR PLACE IN SPACE. 1. Naked Sky, Naked Eye: Finding Your Way in the Dark. Sun Days. Flat Earth, Big Bowl. Celestial Portraits. Who Cares? 2. Ancient Evenings: The First Watchers. A Dragon Eats the Sun: Ancient Chinese Astronomy. Babylon Revisited. Egypt Looks. Stonehenge and the New World. Grecian Formula. 3. The Unexplained Motions of the Heavens. Time on Our Hands. The Sun Goes Dark, the Moon Becomes Blood. Aristotle Lays Down the Law. Ptolemy's Picture. Night Falls. 4. Astronomy Reborn: 1543-1687. Arabian Nights. Heresy of a Polish Priest. The Man with the Golden Nose. Kepler Makes Sense of It. Galileo's Eye. Holding It All Together. II. NOW YOU SEE IT (NOW YOU DON'T). 5. The Art of Collecting Light (with a Telescope). Slice of Light. Buckets of Light. Size Matters. Twinkle, Twinkle. 6. You and Your Telescope. Do I Really Need a Telescope? Science Aside, What Will It Cost? Decisions, Decisions. The Go-To Revolution. I've Bought My Telescope, Now What? Learning to See. 7. Over the Rainbow. Making Waves. Full Spectrum. Heavenly Scoop. 8. Seeing in the Dark. Dark Doesn't Mean You Can't See. What Radio Astronomers "See". You Can Do This, Too! The Rest of the Spectrum. 9. Space Race: From Sputnik to the International Space Station. This Really Is Rocket Science. Early Human Missions. Satellites and Probes. JFK's Challenge. Planetary Probes. Space Shuttles and Space Stations. International Space Station: The Latest. III. A WALK AROUND THE BLOCK. 10. The Moon: Our Closest Neighbor. What If We Had No Moon? Lunar Looking. It's a Moon! Green Cheese? 11. Solar System Home Movie. Solar System History. From Contraction to Condensation. Whipping Up the Recipe. Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust. 12. Solar System Family Snapshot. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: Let's Take a Stroll. The Inner and Outer Circles. Serving Up the Leftovers. Anatomy of a Comet. Catch a Falling Star. 13. So Close and Yet So Far: The Inner Planets. The Terrestrial Roster. Mercury: The Moon's Twin. Forecast for Venus: "Hot, Overcast, and Dense" The Earth: Just Right. Mars: "That Looks Like New Mexico!" Where to Next? 14. Great Balls of Gas! The Outer Planets. The Jovian Line-Up. Rotation: A New Twist. Stormy Weather. Saturnine Atmosphere. The Atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune. Inside the Jovians. The Jovian Magnetospheres. 15. The Far End of the Block. Lord of the Rings. On the Shoulders of Giants. Faraway Moons. Pluto Found. IV. TO THE STARS. 16. Our Star. The Solar Furnace. The Solar Atmosphere. Fun in the Sun. At the Core. 17. Of Giants and Dwarfs: Stepping Out into the Stars. Sizing Them Up. The Parallax Principle. Do Stars Move? How Bright Is Bright? How Hot Is Hot? Stellar Pigeonholes. From Giants to Dwarfs: Sorting the Stars by Size. Making the Main Sequence. 18. Stellar Careers. A Star Evolves. Stellar Nursing Homes. The Life and Death of a High-Mass Star. Supernova: So Long, See You in the Next Star. Neutron Stars. I Can't Stop! 19. Black Holes: One-Way Tickets to Eternity. Is There No End to This Pressure? Relativity. Thought Experiments. Black-Hole Evidence. 20. Stellar Nurseries. An Interstellar Atlas. Star Light, Star Bright. The Interstellar Medium: One Big Fuel Tank. Multiple Births. In the Delivery Room. V. WAY OUT OF THIS WORLD. 21. The Milky Way: Much More Than a Candy Bar. Where Is the Center and Where Are We? Home Sweet Galaxy. Measuring the Milky Way. Milky Way Portrait. Dark Matters. 22. A Galaxy of Galaxies. Sorting Out the Galaxies. Galactic Embrace. How to "Weigh" a Galaxy. Let's Get Organized. Where Does It All Go? 23. Moving Out of Town. A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away... Quasars: Looks Can Be Deceiving. Quasars and the Evolution of Galaxies. A Piece of the Action. Where It All Starts. VI. THE BIG QUESTIONS. 24. Table for One? What Do You Mean by "Alone"? The Odds for Life on Mars. Hello! Is Anybody Out There? A Closer Look at the Equation. Where Are the Little Green Men? 25. What About the Big Bang? The Work of the Cosmologist. I'll Give You Two Clues. Same Old Same Old. So What Was the Big Bang? 26. (How) Will It End? What the Redshift Means. What Does It All Mean? We Have a Problem. Coming Full Circle. Appendixes. Appendix A. Star Words Glossary. Appendix B. Upcoming Eclipses. Appendix C. The Constellations. Appendix D. The Messier Catalog. Appendix E. Sources for Astronomers. Index.