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Things have moved on...


PaulR

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I love old astronomy books... how strange is it going to be for kids in a few years thinking "How daft were they - they thought Pluto was a planet" :D

I bet they make good reading even now though.

Ant

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The book by Peter Lancaster-Brown, Star & Planet Spotting is one of my favourites. It really helped me understand much more about DSO's and how to spot them.

I still have the old copy of The Observers Book of Astronomy by Patrick Moore which got be started in this hobby. It was actually my younger brothers but I nicked it off him and have kept it ever since :D

John

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The Muirden one is a great big chunk of a book - my favourite!

The Menzel book is ridiculous - a poor photo and a negative on the opposite page, of every part of the sky.

The Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy book has some good stuff in it including amateur radio astronomy and mounts that would require a small factory to build!

I'm sure i've got more of these somewhere, I just wish I still had my early 70's Nortons :lol:

As my astronomical knowledge is based on these books (and hasn't been updated much since) you'll probably be seeing some classic bloopers from me....like, you mean Pluto is no longer a planet?! :?

KK, there was no such thing as a PC let alone Photoshop at that time :D

Jahmanson: Yes, the PLB is nice and clear - the Muirden one is an earlier beefed up version really although it doesn't have the star charts (odd!).

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Isn't that the magnetic readable font thats still used for cheque book numbers? I think the ink has magnetic particles in it so tht the writing can be read by a machine similar to a tape recorder.

Kaptain Klevtsov

It does indeed look like a MICR font.

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Talking of olds Astronomy books...A friend of mine was digging around in his attic and found this old book..

"Stars Shown To The Children"..By Ellison Hawks Published October 1910.. :shock:

He gave it to me. :D

I don't think it's worth much but it's a nice old book as a conversation piece ..

Greg

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astronomy has not moved on by much i guess

The biggest thing I've noticed that has happened to astronomy in the last twenty years is in image processing. The magazine Practical Astronomer had an article about managing without the curves function in Photoshop. There is no way of making the images look good unless you have this tool for compressing the dynamic range of images. I've done a couple of processes of the raw data from the digitised images and had a lot of fun. I think these same photographs were used in Burnham's handbooks. The difference is stunning.

Kaptain klevtsov

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