Deep-sky observing is easily the most popular field for amateur astronomers. The big problem faced by non-professional observers is what to look at - what is visible at a particular time of year. The Deep-Sky Observers Year is a month-by-month guide to the best objects to view. Objects are given a "star rating" according to how difficult they are to observe or image with a particular size of telescope. The book includes many images produced by amateur astronomers, as well as photographs from NASA, ESA, and ESO. There is background information about the objects, along with lots of useful tips, hints, and resources.

Celebrating the seventieth anniversary of Coming up for Air and the sixtieth anniversary of 1984.

For the past five decades the Texas Observer has been an essential voice in Texas culture and politics, championing honest government, civil rights, labor, and the environment, while providing a platform for many of the state’s most passionate and progressive voices. Included are ninety-one selections from Roy Bedichek, Lou Dubose, Ronnie Dugger, Dagoberto Gilb, Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, Larry McMurtry, Maury Maverick Jr., Willie Morris, Debbie Nathan, and others. To mark the Observer’s fiftieth anniversary, Char Miller has selected a cross section of the best work to appear in its pages. Not only does the collection pay homage to an important alternative voice in Texas journalism, it also serves as a progressive chronicle of a half-century of life in the Lone Star State—a state that has spawned three presidents in the last forty years. If Texas is, as some say, a crucible for national politics, then Fifty Years of the Texas Observer can be read as a casebook for issues that concern citizens in all fifty states. Molly Ivins's foreword gives historical background for the Observer and sets the stage for the book.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1873.

To the naked eye, the most evident defining feature of the planets is their motion across the night sky. It was this motion that allowed ancient civilizations to single them out as different from fixed stars. “The Observer’s Guide to Planetary Motion” takes each planet and its moons (if it has them) in turn and describes how the geometry of the Solar System gives rise to its observed motions. Although the motions of the planets may be described as simple elliptical orbits around the Sun, we have to observe them from a particular vantage point: the Earth, which spins daily on its axis and circles around the Sun each year. The motions of the planets as observed relative to this spinning observatory take on more complicated patterns. Periodically, objects become prominent in the night sky for a few weeks or months, while at other times they pass too close to the Sun to be observed. “The Observer’s Guide to Planetary Motion” provides accurate tables of the best time for observing each planet, together with other notable events in their orbits, helping amateur astronomers plan when and what to observe. Uniquely each of the chapters includes extensive explanatory text, relating the events listed to the physical geometry of the Solar System. Along the way, many questions are answered: Why does Mars take over two years between apparitions (the times when it is visible from Earth) in the night sky, while Uranus and Neptune take almost exactly a year? Why do planets appear higher in the night sky when they’re visible in the winter months? Why do Saturn’s rings appear to open and close every 15 years? This book places seemingly disparate astronomical events into an understandable three-dimensional structure, enabling an appreciation that, for example, very good apparitions of Mars come around roughly every 15 years and that those in 2018 and 2035 will be nearly as good as that seen in 2003. Events are listed for the time period 2010-2030 and in the case of rarer events (such as eclipses and apparitions of Mars) even longer time periods are covered. A short closing chapter describes the seasonal appearance of deep sky objects, which follow an annual cycle as a result of Earth’s orbital motion around the Sun.

From May 1894 to Sept. 1895 the sections Outdoor world and Practical microscopy were issued as separate publications.

In Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s experimental thriller The Assignment, the wife of a psychiatrist has been raped and killed near a desert ruin in North Africa. Her husband hires a woman named F. to reconstruct the unsolved crime in a documentary film. F. is soon unwittingly thrust into a paranoid world of international espionage where everyone is watched—including the watchers. After discovering a recent photograph of the supposed murder victim happily reunited with her husband, F. becomes trapped in an apocalyptic landscape riddled with political intrigue, crimes of mistaken identity, and terrorism. F.’s labyrinthine quest for the truth is Dürrenmatt’s fictionalized warning against the dangers of a technologically advanced society that turns everyday life into one of constant scrutiny. Joel Agee’s elegant translation will introduce a fresh generation of English-speaking readers to one of European literature’s masters of language, suspense, and dystopia. “The narrative is accelerated from the start. . . . As the novella builds to its horripilating climax, we realize the extent to which all values have thereby been inverted. The Assignment is a parable of hell for an age consumed by images.”—New York Times Book Review “His most ambitious book . . . dark and devious . . . almost obsessively drawn to mankind’s most fiendish crimes.”—Chicago Tribune “A tour-de-force . . . mesmerizing.”—Village Voice