Celestial Delights

Celestial Delights is essentially a 'TV Guide' for teh sky. This will be its third edition. This title, which has aggregated sales of about 20,000 copies to date in its two previous editions and has found a niche with skygazers, is much awaited.

Through extensive graphics integrated with an eight-year-long calendar of sky events, it provides a look at 'don't miss' sky events, mostly for naked-eye and binocular observing. The book is organized by ease of observation - lunar phases and the brighter planets come first, while solar eclipses, the aurora, and comets come later. Celestial Delights also includes a hefty dose of sky lore, astronomical history, and clear overviews of current science. It provides a handy reference to upcoming naked-eye events, with information broken out in clear and simple diagrams and tables that are cross-referenced against a detailed almanac for each year covered.

Most broad-ranging astronomy field guides focus on stars, constellations, and the deep sky, but tend to ignore planetary events, which are in by far the most widely observable aspects of the changing night sky.

Celestial Delights puts a variety of information all in one place, presents it in a friendly way that does not require prior in-depth astronomical knowledge, but provides the context and historical background for understanding events that astronomical computer programs or web sites lack.

Francis Reddy is a senior science writer for Syneren Technologies Corp., and writes science-related press releases and other content for the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. He previously served as a senior editor at Astronomy magazine and has published several books for skygazers of all ages, including Halley's Comet! (AstromMedia, 1985), The Children's Atlas of the Universe (Rand McNally & Co., 1990), as well as two previous editions of Celestial Delights (Ten Speed Press, 1992 and 2002) with more than 20,000 copies in print.