Solar System Books

The contents of the book are as the title says, for building yourself your own solar heating system. The book elaborates a lot on how exactly do the plumbing and building work but fails to explains some basics. These basics/rules of thumb are however well explained in another book I bought "Solar Water Heating".

I plan to get various offers from companies, select the best offer, based on what I have learned by means of solar heating books, not to build the system myself, so the book was not the right choice for my needs. I would not buy it again.

This book provides exellent detail for the one type of installation that the author chose for his situation. Pieces and parts of the book will provide good reference and construction details for my final project (I especially like the colletor design). However, no other options were discussed other than the author's particular preference (hot air/rock heat exhange in a 6 foot deep, underground, insulated chamber). I recommend this book as a good additional resource for you to determine your own particular installation.

With gas and oil prices at record highs and more price hikes looming on the near horizon, Kenneth Clive's step-by-step, do-it-yourself construction manual, "Build Your Own Solar Heating System" is timely and critically important for homeowners wanting to lower their monthly utility bills. Using readily available materials, "Build Your Own Solar Heating System" deftly and methodically guides the reader through the process of constructing and installing a solar heating system from choosing the right materials to assembling them in good working order. Nicely illustrated throughout with detailed diagrams and photos, the reader is given instructions for each phase of their solar heating system installation project, including a wealth of practical tips for getting the task accomplished safely and effectively. Instructions are organized for building one section at a time. Of special note is the 'how to' information to sweat copper plumbing joints and the electronic diagrams to building solar heating system controls. A very highly recommended addition to personal and community library Home Technology & Improvement reference collections, "Build Your Own Solar Heating System" provides everything the non-specialist general reader needs to know to get the job done with the competence of a professional.

This book is interesting enough, but was very hard to understand sometimes. At times during reading i would have to look up several words just to try to grasp what the writer was talking about. I would reccomend this book to someone who is seeking a more in depth look into Astronomy. Gives lots of good information and comes with a very imformative computer program that provides several tutorials on how to use it. Good book, too indepth for this reader.

This book is great. Along with the media it serves as a guide to understand the most boring class you will ever take in GSP @ NYU!

This book does the job it is designed to do, and it is written well, so it is relatively easy to understand. I recommend this book.

The title of this book is very misleading for the reader and interested buyer. The first two-thirds of this book consists of some basic astronomy information and the history of the moon and many pages of the moon's geography. The author only focuses on photography within the last third of the book and even then he never really gets into any substance about the techniques of astrophotography. The images are really poor and I suppose works since the author only concentrates on doing astrophotography on a shoestring budget. I don't see how this publication is beneficial to any amateur astronomer or astrophotographer. It is not worth the money. There are numerous books (many I own) on astrophotography and digital astrophotography that really are jammed-packed with quality photos and techniques. Also, the few methods that the author's does touch upon in this book seem very anchient. The author donates 150 pages of this book (out of 254) alone to the moon and it is all about its history, formation and pages upon pages of moon atlas pics. I highly recommend that the buyer first read and review this book before purchasing. Very disappointing!

I was so pleased to know that such a book as this was available to help amateur astronomers new to astrophotography. I am now enjoying the easy to read introductions to each sky target and using the simple but necessary instructions to make the photography possible. Also very pleasing is that the superb images illustrated can be very closely matched by my efforts after reading this book. How refreshing not to have to wade through off-putting text and theory in order to capture beautiful pictures immediately with readily available and inexpensive equipment. I thoroughly recommend this work to anyone eager to begin taking sky pictures, especially of the Moon.

This book shows that you don't need to spend thousands of dollars to be able to take pictures of astronomical objects.

The book is an encouragement to amateur astronomers or someone with only a passing interest in the night sky, to go out and take photographs of the the Moon and planets. It shows how anyone can take an astronomical photo with a family digital camera and a little ingenuity and imagination.

The book also doubles as a photographic atlas to the Moon with detailed notes on what can be seen in the photographs.

I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the night sky or photography.

Being an amateur astronomer for 50 years, I consider this book required reading for anyone interested in astrophotography. It is written in a way that will not bewilder the beginner and is more than technical enough for the advanced. CCD imagery is a different field and this book does not intend to try to cover that, even if was written more recently. Definitely worth the money. The authors know what they are doing and know how to explain it. In my opinion, a classic.

This is a first rate book on the practical study of our solar system. It covers telescopes, mountings, filters, cameras, films and other equipment. Information, observing tips and programs, sketches and photographs are presented for the Moon, 8 planets, minor bodies and comets.

The film photography section is the best I've read for work on the Moon and planets at high power in telescopes and meteors and star fields in wide angle camera lenses. Formulae are provided for guess-free calculation of magnification, exposure time and tracking factors. For those that are so inclined, various darkroom techniques are also discussed at great length for developing and processing images.

The only drawback of this book is its date. Recent advances in film and in digital techniques of processing and the use of CCD and video cameras are not covered. But for those who wish to pursue the most accessible methods of observing our solar system, this is the best book around.

The book is a good starter for real beginners hence its title is apt. The writing style is very dry which is most likely the influence of Dobbins who's articles are generally dry, cynical and sometimes self promoting. Parkers reputation and expertise with planetary imaging certainly gives the book some value. If you're serious about solar system photography, there are many other better resources available though for the absolute beginner it may be worthwhile.

I learned nothing form this book

If the person from Canada thought "it bit", perhaps they he would like to sell it to someone that finds the information invaluable. No other book published before or since focuses on the subject better!

This book is an invaluable source of information for the professional, and is also useful for those who have some background in geology. I've had this book checked out of the library for 2 years! It's time to get my own copy!

the first two-thirds of this book is well written. mr. verma offers a variety of theories on the tunguska incident. the book is well researched from a scientific point of view. where the book falls apart for me, is in the alternative theory section which he labels x-files. here mr. verma ridicules and basically insults any ufo type of explanation. to know where mr. verma is coming from, he gives the history of roswell in a page and a half, concluding it was a weather balloon with dummies. clearly, in my opinion, mr. verma threw the baby, bathwater and tub out in his research. and as anyone should know, debunkers of any theory use ridicule first. so, if you are a right-winged conservative, scientific purist, this book is for you, and should be on your shelf. if you're looking for a book that objectively looks at all theories in a balanced, well-respected manner, skip this book. mr. verma has his biased agenda and presents it well. with any kind of belief, the bottom line is this: if you believe, no evidence is needed, and if you don't believe no amount of evidence will do. the tunguska topic is interesting and i look forward to reading more interesting books on it.

I thought that the Tunguska event had been solved a number of years ago. It is clear from this book that it is not. The author has done a commendable job of presenting the history of the Tunguska devastation in 1908 and of the work that has been done since then in trying to identify what caused it. Theories abound, from the plausible, i.e., a comet or asteroid, to the absurd, e.g., an alien spaceship. This author writes extremely well and weaves a most intriguing yarn - at times funny, at times tongue-in-cheek, mostly serious but always absolutely fascinating. This is a great book that is impossible to put down. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in whodunits or scientific mysteries.

In the early morning of June 30, 1908, a fireball flew across the Siberian sky and exploded in a 15 megaton blast that flattened 2,150 acres of Siberian forest. In the years that followed, scientists correlated atmospheric pressure readings, reports of unusually bright sunsets and "night glows" in the skies over northern Europe, recordings of seismic waves, and eyewitness accounts, concluding that the cause was probably a stony asteroid that entered the earth's atmosphere and broke up explosively 8 kilometers above the Earth at 7:14 am local time.

Verma's story doesn't end there, of course, or "The Tunguska Fireball" would be a fairly short book. As it is, Verma uses the Tunguska event to embark on an entertaining discussion of how scientists came to understand what had probably happened in the skies over Siberia. The investigations into this remote area were difficult and the findings yielded many interesting theories, ranging from fairly plausible ideas about the arrival of a stony asteroid or comet, to more exotic hypotheses involving black holes, antimatter, mirror matter, volcanoes, ball lightning, and "geometeors," to really bizarre notions about crippled alien spaceships, laser beams from other planets and death rays secretly invented by Nikola Tesla (really). The Tunguska event offers a great excuse to digress among a number of interesting ideas, although I confess that I find Verma's explanations of the underlying science to be a tad murky at times.

When the dust settles (so to speak), I'll place my bets on the stony asteroid theory, with a sentimental vote for the killer comet--the other hypotheses seem to require too much special pleading to be a compelling way to think about the event, at least based on the information we have in hand today. That said, the most sobering revelation in Verma's book is his report of the "mini-Tunguska" event of September 24, 2002. A US satellite spotted an object that entered the earth's atmosphere, but lost it as it fell below 30 kilometers; a few moments later, another satellite reported a fireball exploding in the cloudy skies above Siberia. The explosion flattened 100 square kilometers of forest with the energy of a small atomic bomb, but no one witnessed the fireball and, as far as we know, no one was killed or injured. The story would have been very different if the object, whatever it was, had exploded above a populated area.

Verma's books makes entertaining and sobering reading. "The Tunguska Fireball" will make you wonder how many more objects are floating around in the void with Earth's name on them.

This book has a lot of good information on setting up a photovaltaic systems, I was forced to use it in his Photovaltaic course at FAU in FL. The book has lots of examples on different systems. The problems in the book are a bit to difficult and the answer could not be found in his book.

As with the first edition, this update by Messenger and Ventre is very well suited for a one-semester upper division course in EE or Engineering Technology, or for self study if one knows basic electric (mainly DC) circuit theory. As the title suggests, it's an applications-oriented book, with semiconductor physics (appropriately) relegated to the last two chapters. There are very few derivatives or integrals in the text, and basic algebra is sufficient for the end-of-chapter exercises. Reading 20 pages per day and answering a dozen or so questions from the exercises will get the self-study student through the text in less than a month. PSE is also one of the few books recommended by the NABCEP for the Solar PV Installer Certification Exam. There are a number of excellent PV physics books available today, but this is the only complete and up-to-date systems engineering text I know of.

This book only gives one a cursory look at designing systems but does not get into any practical depth. Most dissapointing was the complete lack of discussion as to the limitations of inverters in regard to their specific input voltage parameters and the matching of modules to inverters. It's a good overview for one who is serious about learning what PV systems are all about but is not detailed enough for practical design and implementation of a functional PV system.

But not. I saw this on my advisor's shelf and thought it would be totally useful to have on my own. Sometimes its a pain to look up planetary data on the web while doing work, and I thought that maybe it would be nice to have it close at hand in hardcopy.

The previous reviewer gave a good assessment of the overall content of the book -- its a compilation of data relevant to planetary scientists including bulk data on the planets (mass, radius, orbital semimajor axis), chemical data on the planets (relevant chemical reactions, weight % of species), general chemical data (molecular weights and such), etc. Basically a whole bunch of stuff that you use relatively often but always have to go fumbling through your papers to find.

Unfortunately, the level of errors (typographical or otherwise) in the book is too high to allow me to use it when I really need it. In a textbook, or a popular book, description of the concepts and processes involved are more important than getting facts right, so this sort of typo thing doesn't matter. However, in a book of facts, if some of the facts are wrong, it brings into doubt the validity of the rest. Basically, my problem is that I can use it for back-of-the-envelope calculations, but if I'm going to put something in a paper I look it up on the web to make sure that it isn't one of the mistakes. Looking it up on the web was what I used to do anyway, before I got the book. So, in my experience, it hasn't been as useful as I had hoped it would be.

Like a poor-debating jerk I can't remember any particular errors except the one that goaded me into writing this review -- as I was looking through the table on bulk data of planets and satellites it claimed that the 5 major Uranian satellites (Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon) orbited retrograde. I didn't think that was the case, and when I checked on the NSSDC website sure enough, it wasn't.

I have not found the same level of errors as the previous reviewer mainly because I am in a different field of planetary science, and I really appreciated having a useful and readily available text as a source of data. The chemical tables are excellent and rigorous, as one would expect from two planetary chemists. The meteorite data compilation is among the best I've ever seen. Planetary data is accurate to the mid-1990s, and is excellent for quick calculations. References are given for all tables, and should be conferred with prior to publishing anything.

Since my field area is rather varied (astrobiology), this book fills a special void in that it compiles data from numerous subjects. If I need to know the mass of Europa, the abundance and location of S class asteroids, and the escape velocity of Mars, this text has it in a fairly easy to find format.

Three books on our solar system appeared in the last year or two. Each has its own "flavor." I will review them in turn, but browsers should be aware of the others, so they are listed here. In addition to this book, see "The New Solar System" J. Kelly Beatty, Carolyn Collins Petersen, Andrew Chaikin, and "Solar System Dynamics," C. D. Murray and S. F. Dermott.

This book is primarily for the research planetary chemist and geologist. Exhaustive tables are given of the chemical and geological features of the planets and their atmospheres, with a chapter devoted to each. What enticed me to buy the book were the mathematical formulae listed in the index. But these prove to be primarily for reference and do not enter significantly into the subsequent textual material.

I was tempted to return this book because it is relatively expensive for a 400 page paperback. But I decided to keep it out of respect for those planetary aspects which, at present, I am not deeply interested in, but which may in the future enter into my investigation and understanding.

For instance, why do the four inner planets differ so strikingly in density from the five outer planets? Did resonance conditions in the early solar system in some way resemble a mass spectrometer of cosmic dimensions!

It is clear that we have to know the chemistry as well as the physics in order to understand the solar system in its formative stages. This book well serves that dual purpose.

David begins his book in an unsuspecting manner with a quick look back at how comets effected the lives of our ancestors; before the age of telescopes. Briefly, he demonstrates that comets were recognized by not only early scientist, but poets and "fallen princes."

His book is lightly peppered with people, events, and places of historical significance; e.g., that Edmond Halley "dropped out" from Oxford and "headed south that same year to the island of St. Helena, the island that, more than a century later, would serve as Napoleon's home after the battle of Waterloo."

He takes you on a journey through the discovery of comets (in which some cases, comets turn out to be planets - as was in the case of Uranus, Herschel 1781), the recovery of comets, and he discusses the ardent task of mathematically calculating orbits and estimating returns (it was Encke the "mathematician", not Pons "the astronomer", whose name lives on with the 3 1/3 yr. comet - Comet Encke).

He speaks of houses "made of comets." Actually, financed by comets for the honored American astronomer Bernard, who, with 2 months of formal education, paid his bills by discovering comets. You also hear the tales of morale boosting pranks that college fellows play on one another.

He continues on through the pain staking task of searching and searching, for hours on end, until after 917 hours and 28 minutes, spread out over 19 years, he discovered a comet. Correction, he co-discovered a comet. It was discovered simultaneously by another American astronomer. Very interesting to hear him tell the story.

David touches on systematic comet search techniques, tips on film, pros and cons of CCD (digital imaging and why film is better), the problem of staying focused, and how he breaks the sky down into a grid and methodically examines each point of light; twice! (per night...) How else can one detect *ever so slow-motion movement* of a very distant object?

Finally, David chronicles the discovery, predictions, and events leading up to the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter. Very enjoyable read.

P.S. The book has many pictures scattered throughout and has a nice set of color photos at the books center.

I bought this book by noted comet discover David Levy hoping that it would serve as a practical guide for amateur astronomers interested in observing and studying comets. Instead, this book is mostly about how Mr. Levy and his dedicated search team discover comets. If you're looking for advice on what type of telescope is best for observing comets (or maybe large binoculars are better?) you won't find it here. While Levy briefly mentions the telescopes he uses, there was no discussion of the equipment options available to the typical amateur astronomer on a budget (wide field refractors and reflectors, binoculars, etc.). The book also lacks advice regarding the weather conditions and locations that are best for observing comets - except to note that at one point Levy and his family moved to Arizona. That's great for them, but what about the rest of us who can't pack up our lives and move to the desert? The book is light on text and heavy on black and white images, many of which are grainy and provide little useful information. One of the more informative sections of the book is the explanation of the arcane new naming system for comets that was developed by the International Astronomical Union in the mid 1990s. There is also a brief discussion of the morphology of comets and the terminology used to describe the various components that can be seen visually. I would have liked this discussion to have been more detailed, perhaps citing various examples based on visual observations using amateur instruments. Levy devotes a large section of the book to his discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy, which collided with Jupiter in 1994. Although this is a significant achievement worthy of mention, its important to note that this comet was discovered using a large professional telescope the likes of which most amateurs will never be able to use. Levy also devotes considerable space to describing his experience searching for comets photographically, on old plates, and with CCDs, yet he gives short shrift to visual observation, which is relegated to the back of the book. As Levy correctly notes, the advent of inexpensive CCD cameras and remote telescope operation, combined with wide-field astrograph telescopes, has largely replaced visual sweeping as the main method of comet discovery. However, most readers of this book will probably not be engaged in comet discovery efforts, but will be using their eyes to search for known comets. It is this type of casual visual observer that the book largely lets down. Based on Mr. Levy's reputation as a dedicated and accomplished amateur observer, I was expecting a more comprehensive treatment of the subject that could serve both as a reference and as a practical guide at the eyepiece. Instead, I found this book to be mainly a recap of the notable achievements of the Levies and a few of their colleagues. Interesting, but not exactly a practical guide for the amateur.

The step by step procedures are excellent; the clear and comprehensive explanations of basic solar thermal heating concepts make the book invaluable. I never thought I'd be able to build and install my own solar hot water system from basic construction materials... until now! Thank you for blazing a trail into the "Solar Age" :-)

This book is step by step instructions for building the system that the author built. There is no general information, and no engineering data. If you live on Long Island and want a cookbook approach this is a good book. Otherwise it's not so hot.