Experience the discovery of most of the universe.

Extraordinarily well written!! Perfect balance of technical and human storytelling. A must read for anyone interested in astronomy. Easily read and enjoyed by non-technical savy y listeners.

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19 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Telescopes, cameras and Spectographs

What made the experience of listening to Starlight Detectives the most enjoyable?

I found the history of the characters behind the evolution of the telescope and the camera the most interesting. Although the story behind the spectrograph was surprisingly well told. The reader is perfect.

What other book might you compare Starlight Detectives to and why?

Longitude

Which scene was your favorite?

Louis Daguerre and the invention of the camera. The history behind the modern and old observatories.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No

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14 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

very interesting

A week written and well read account of the history of astrophysics. As an amateur astronomer of many decades I found it fascinating to read about the struggles of pioneers in celestial photography in particular.

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12 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Interesting book, but eccentric reading

This is a non-fiction book, read by a performer as though it were a fiction that requires distinct voices for each character. Thus, he uses exaggerated, even goofy accents based on the national origin of each researcher quoted. This is most distracting, particularly because his accent for every English writer, no matter how well-heeled, sounds as though the researcher grew up in London's East End. It's the full Van Dyke.

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1 personne a trouvé cela utile

Well structured, but not the easiest to listen to

There is difficulty in this genre - the book jumps in time all the time to narrate different lines of the complex intervined history of invention and discovery. This keeps you on your toes when listening, but this is probably the best way to represent those kind of information

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1 personne a trouvé cela utile

For the astronomy buff

Amazing amount of detail on early technology related to telescopes, photography, and the interesting people behind it all.
Good narration. Clearly Barrett put in a lot of effort to get the pronunciation of foreign words and names correct. I like his variety of accents as well.

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Excellent and very Readable History of Astronomy

Finally a book which tells us of the personalities behind these great discoveries. Very, very well done.

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A story of imaging stars

This is not my favorite book on discovering the skies. It is jam packed full of information, with so many characters, I could not develop a clear sense of any of them.

The story is really more about the improvements in imaging the universe than of the discoveries themselves. There is more than I ever imagined about the competitive approaches to photographing through telescopes. (I use the word photographing generically - I know that it not inclusive, as is exhaustively discussed in this book). I was surprised at the resistance to using anything other than the human eye to document what has been seen in the skies.

Astronomy and astrophysics have always drawn my curiosity and sense of discovery, but this book, sadly did not take me on that journey.

As noted in other reviews, Joe Barrett is a fine narrator but not the best for this book. His skills are probably better suited for fiction.

For something more comprehensible in an audiobook, try anything by Stephen Hawking or Neil deGrasse Tyson or look at the highest rated books in the astronomy category. This one is a bit of a snooze that should probably be left for those with a special interest in its narrow focus.

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Very well done, but not for the casual listener

What I had hoped for was a short history of astronomy written for the layperson. But what I found instead was a book that goes into a textbook level of detail---one whose target audience would be those working or studying in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics.

Most of the book's focus is on the 1800s. Of the 13+ hours, perhaps a half-hour or so of it delves into the early 1900s, and that's where it ends. I found that disappointing, as my primary interest was in learning about advancements from the 1900s to present.

None of this should be deemed as a critique of this well written book. They're simply observations to help readers determine whether or not this is what they're looking for.

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Highly recommended

This book is a great listen for anyone interested in astronomy. Most of the book is spent on an account of the transition of astronomy from an amateur hobby in the 19th century to a professional and rigorous scientifically field, culminating in Edwin Hubble's work at Mount Wilson Observatory to establish that spiral nebulae are galaxies well outside our own that are speeding away from us at a rate that increases with their distance to us. It gives some very interesting historical perspective on many current active fields of research in astrophysics, such as dark matter and energy.

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