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Biography & Autobiography. Science. Nonfiction. HTML: The story of the people who see beyond the stars�??an astronomy book for adults still spellbound by the night sky. Humans from the earliest civilizations through today have craned their necks each night, using the stars to orient themselves in the large, strange world around them. Stargazing is a pursuit that continues to fascinate us: from Copernicus to Carl Sagan, astronomers throughout history have spent their lives trying to answer the biggest questions in the universe. Now, award-winning astronomer Emily Levesque shares the stories of modern-day stargazers in this new nonfiction release, the people willing to adventure across high mountaintops and to some of the most remote corners of the planet, all in the name of science. From the lonely quiet of midnight stargazing to tall tales of wild bears loose in the observatory, The Last Stargazers is a love letter to astronomy and an affirmation of the crucial role that humans can and must play in the future of scientific discovery. In this sweeping work of narrative science, Levesque shows how astronomers in this scrappy and evolving field are going beyond the machines to infuse creativity and passion into the stars and space and inspires us all to peer skyward in pursuit of the universe's secrets.… (more)
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The Last Stargazers is a tough book to categorize. Part memoir, part history, and part science book, this accessible and sometimes humorous book gives readers all sorts of stories about a fascinating and pretty rare job. She never gets over-heavy on the math/science aspects while still sharing a lot of fascinating tidbits about stars, telescopes, and how an observatory works. Interviewing dozens of fellow astronomers, Emily shares her own and others' stories of the work, and delves into hairier aspects such as inequalities and the challenges of the future with an even-handed approach.
> I had a couple of observers at Cerro
> The 3:00 a.m. haze in particular is what makes music choice utterly critical to observing runs. Almost any astronomer you ask will tell you that playing the right music is a vitally important ingredient for any observing run, to the point that it acquires an almost talismanic quality. Many observers have music that they only play at the telescope or set up playlists matched to the various steps of the night. Generally, most observers tend toward more energetic music as the night gets later. Someone who might have queued up Bob Dylan at the start of the night will have moved on to AC/DC by the time the early morning hours roll around.
> multiple observatories have settled on what has been nicknamed “the mothinator,” a simple but effective combination of a lamp, a fan, and an industrial-sized garbage bucket that can fill to the brim with moth carcasses in a matter of days during peak moth season.
> a funny quirk of these little creatures: they seem to love watching sunsets. Invariably, when a group of astronomers gathers on a Chilean observatory summit to watch the sun go down, we can spot a viscacha or two somewhere along the hillside
> One recent and amusing source of noise in [LIGO] Washington had stemmed from the liquid nitrogen tanks used to cool the detector. In warm weather, ice would form on the pipes leading to the tanks, and enterprising ravens would start pecking at the ice as a handy source of water on a hot day. That tap-tap-tap was enough to launch a full-scale investigation into what was causing noise in the detector.
> On July 4, 1054, the supernova death of a star only 6,500 light-years away grew so bright that it outshone every other object in the sky besides the sun and the moon. It was visible in the daytime sky for two weeks and was immortalized in Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic historical records and in an Ancestral Puebloan pictograph in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. The remnant of that supernova, the Crab Nebula, is one of the most famous and well-photographed objects in today’s sky.
> The astronomy community got a handy published table listing the key elements present in the spectrum of a match, the Haute-Provence spectrograph room was declared nonsmoking, and the mystery was solved.
> In 2018, an astronomer excitedly posted on the Astronomer’s Telegram website to report a “very bright” new object that had appeared in the constellation Sagittarius. Forty minutes later, he sheepishly circulated an update: the bright object was simply Mars