about the book

  • The book focuses on the dazzling beauty and wonder of the night sky, with engaging and easy to understand explanations of what the reader is seeing
  • The stunning photos chosen for the book are from various published and unpublished sources, including Hubble, the ESO collection, the Danish 1.5-m Telescope collection, and the personal collection of Robert Gendler
  • Very comprehensive and modern photographic book of the southern deep sky
  • The pictures encompass a range of sizes, from the distant views of hobby telescopes to the eagle-eye vision of the large professional ground-based and space-based telescopes

The beauty and richness of the southern night sky is unsurpassed. From southern latitudes the finest globular clusters in the sky are visible to the unaided eye, as are the nearest galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds. The brightest part of the Milky Way passes overhead during the southern winter and both the nearest bright star and the distinctive and memorable asterism that is the Southern Cross are both observable throughout most of the year.

A new frontier in the human quest to systematically explore and chart our local Universe, the southern sky became accessible to scientific scrutiny only a few centuries ago, after the first European explorers ventured south of the equator. Modern observing and imaging techniques have since revealed what seems like a new Universe, previously hidden below the horizon, a fresh astronomical bounty of beauty and knowledge distinctly different from the northern sky. The authors have crafted a book that brings this hidden Universe to all, regardless of location or latitude.

Despite its richness, the southern sky has received less attention than its northern counterpart, and fewer photographs exist of its more obscure, yet equally surprising and intriguing objects. This visual anthology features striking photographic portraits of the most celebrated as well as its more obscure gems. The finest available images have been carefully selected have been assembled using the latest digital methods, revealing these southern treasures in ways never before seen.

To provide a context, the pictures capture the sky in a variety of scales, from the wide vistas seen through hobby telescopes to the tiny fields relayed in exquisitely rich detail by the powerful optics of the largest professional telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope and ESO's telescopes. The beauty of the night sky is on display in vivid color and dazzling detail. The presentation is further enhanced by a detailed history of southern sky exploration and lucid text that describes the southern night-sky wonders in ways that are engaging and non-technical.

“Treasures of the Southern Sky” celebrates the remarkable beauty and rich variety of the southern sky in words and with world-class imagery. In part a photographic anthology of deep sky wonders south of the celestial equator, this book also celebrates the human story of southern astronomy with an engaging and detailed history of key contributors to southern sky exploration. The accompanying text provides the reader with intriguing facts and useful information about the featured objects.

The volume is arranged by southern hemisphere season and brings to the reader many of the most provocative and beautiful astronomical images of our time, many in print for the first time. The collection of imagery covers a full range of deep sky astronomical objects, including the familiar and iconic as well as those that are more obscure but no less intriguing. Masterful, state of the art professional and amateur astrophotography highlights the authors’ carefully selected deep sky “treasures.”

Features:

Hardcover: 220 pages
Publisher: Springer (www.springer.com)
ISBN: 978-1-4614-0627-3
Size: 247 mm (W) x 297 mm (H)
Languages: Available in English