Science : Astronomy

Astronomy is the science of studying the sky using telescopes and light collectors such as photographic plates or CCD detectors. However, people have always studied the sky and continue to study the sky without the aid of instruments this is the realm of cultural astronomy. This is the first scholarly collection of articles focused on the cultural astronomy of Africans. It weaves together astronomy, anthropology, and Africa. The volume includes African myths and legends about the sky, alignments to celestial bodies found at archaeological sites and at places of worship, rock art with celestial imagery, and scientific thinking revealed in local astronomy traditions including ethnomathematics and the creation of calendars. Authors include astronomers Kim Malville, Johnson Urama, and Thebe Medupe; archaeologist Felix Chami, and geographer Michael Bonine, and many new authors. As an emerging subfield of cultural astronomy, African cultural astronomy researchers are focused on training students specifically for doing research in Africa. The first part of the volume contains lessons and exercises to help the beginning student of African cultural astronomy. Included are exercises in archaeoastronomy, cultural anthropology, and naked-eye astronomy penned by authors who use these regularly use these methods for their research. This collection of lessons and research papers provides a foundation for the cultural astronomy researcher interested in doing work in Africa. more...

Price: $149.00

Born in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, Agnes Mary Clerke achieved fame as the author of A History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century. This biography describes the life of the woman who became the leading commentator of her time on astronomy and astrophysics in the English-speaking world. more...

Price: $64.00

Science journalist Seife's narrative about the fundamentals of cosmology will appeal both to readers basically oblivious to the subject and those who keep up with it--from the grandstands of popular science literature, at least. This dual appeal stems from the author's exceptional clarity and the convulsions-shaking cosmology in recent years. Supernovae hunters who look for the exploding stars to fix the rate of the universe's expansion have been startled to discover that the expansion seems to be accelerating, upending the conventional wisdom that it ought to be decelerating. At the subatomic end of the scale, Seife presents the experiments planned by particle physicists to account for such an unexpected result, which verily demands the existence of an as-yet-undiscovered repelling force. more...

Price: $15.00

Das Begleitbuch zur gleichnamigen ZDF-Dokumentation "Armageddon ??? Der Einschlag" schildert die Hintergr??nde einer globalen Katastrophe: Vor 65 Millionen Jahren setzte ein Asteroideneinschlag der Herrschaft der Dinosaurier ein Ende. Was aber w??re, wenn ein solcher "Dinokiller" heute auf der Erde einschlagen w??rde? Das Buch folgt den Auswirkungen eines solchen Impakts ??? von den unmittelbaren Folgen des Einschlags bis zu den langfristigen Ver??nderungen der Tier- und Pflanzenwelt, aber auch der menschlichen Gesellschaft. F??r Laien verst??ndlich und anschaulich, aber dennoch wissenschaftlich fundiert, gibt das Buch einen Einblick in die Erkenntnisse ??ber die Folgen eines Meteoriteneinschlags. Zehn hochrangige internationale Wissenschaftler unterschiedlicher Fachgebiete sind an der Entstehung von Buch und Film beteiligt und kommen in Interviews und Kommentaren zu Wort. more...

Price: $39.95

Authoritative account of the contributions to science made by the Hipparcos satellite, for astronomers, astrophysicists and cosmologists. more...

Price: $112.00