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EDITORIAL INFORMATION

Astronomical photometry is the science of measuring the brightness and colour of stars and other celestial objects. It is a technique at the very heart of modern astrophysics. This authoritative volume traces the fascinating historical development of astronomical photometry - from visual techniques at the time of William Herschel in the 1780s, through to the birth of photometry with charged-coupled devices in the 1980s. In this intriguing survey, we see how the advent of new technology has revolutionized the science of photometry at each stage of its development, and what dramatic advances have been achieved, despite several major disasters - specially in the practice of photographic photometry. This book also clearly illustrates the critical relationship between the development of a science and the technology it uses. The Measurement of Starlight provides profesional astronomers with a valuable guide to the background and development of this fundamental technique. It will also be of great interest to amateur astronomers and historians of the physical sciences.

(Extracted from the back cover)

GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

-Contents.

-Preface.

-Acknowledgements.

-1- The First Stellar Magnitudes.

-2- Visual Magnitude Estimates.

-3- Visual Photometric Measurements.

-4- The Early Days of Photographic Photometry (1839-1922).

-5- The Origins of Photoelectric Photometry (1892-1945).

-6- Photometry at Longer Wavelenght.

-7- Photographic Photometry from 1922.

-8- Photometry and the Birth of Astrophysics.

-9- Photoelectric Photometry with the Photomultiplier.

-10- Photometry with area Detectors.

-Sources of Illustrations.

-Name Index.

-Star Index.

-Subject Index.

OUR REVIEW

It actually is amazing how much we know of the Universe (or how little, depending on our point of view), through the mere observation of the myriad of points of light surrounding us in any starlit night. The specialized study of such a scarce amount of light has allowed us to know where we are, what the history of the Cosmos is and its probable future. Amongst the techniques that have done this possible we find precisely one of the most basic ones for astronomy: photometry, the science that measures the brightness of astronomical objects.

In this book J.B. Hearnshaw tells us the history of photometry applied to astronomy, in all its kinds, and the result is a very interesting tour around the true roots of current astronomical knowledge. Many of the conclusions reached by experts lie precisely on the exact measurements taken by means of photometry, which reveals its importance. Thus, its evolution throughout the years has also been accompanied by a logical improvement in their estimations, and therefore, a greater accuracy in the theories that have been based on the results obtained by photometry. The author explains us all this in great depth, thus succeeding in creating an almost definite work on this issue, in the field of major popularization of science that has always been distinctive in the collections published by Cambridge University Press.