Astronomical Measurement: A Concise Guide, Andy Lawrence, Springer, 2014. $89.99 (192 pp.). ISBN 978-3-642-39834-6
In Astronomical Measurement: A Concise Guide, Andy Lawrence, the Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, provides a delightfully comprehensive summary of the essential information the budding observational astronomer needs to know. This elegantly succinct textbook—just 143 pages long, plus two appendices—is an inclusive overview of the issues a serious astronomy student should understand to plan science observations. It is aimed at the advanced undergraduate and the beginning graduate student, but it can also serve as an engaging refresher for the working astronomer who wants to venture into a new wavelength regime. For a practical handbook on observational strategies, challenges, and tactics, look no further.
We astronomers live at a time in which all sorts of ground- and space-based astronomical facilities are available to us. Lawrence makes it clear, though, that the problems of signal-to-noise ratio, atmospheric distortion, imaging resolution, detector efficiency, and spectroscopy are analogous across wavelength regimes and that basic observation strategies can be duplicated or adapted to various instruments. What’s required is for astronomers to know what celestial phenomena we want to study and what physical properties will help us understand them.
While reading Astronomical Measurement, one thought kept coming back to me: Where were books like this when I was an astronomy student? As a professional who has worked across the electromagnetic spectrum but trained with a bias toward optical astronomy, I am thrilled to see this text. No longer will the student need to struggle through separate introductory textbooks to learn about observing with optical, radio, and high-energy telescopes. Astronomical Measurement covers them all. I would even recommend it as background for proposal writing, provided the writer is already familiar with the physics of radiative processes, which is not covered in detail.
Lawrence’s book is clear about what it is not: a lengthy tome of technical details. For every concept introduced in a chapter, the “Further Reading” and “References” sections at the chapter’s end direct the reader to more thorough discussions in relevant technical books, articles, and manuals. Consequently, Astronomical Measurement will also serve as an excellent reference. Lawrence places his discussion of statistics and orbital mechanics into the appendices, thus making them crucial overview reading. Nonetheless, the student will need to go elsewhere for greater detail on those topics.
I particularly enjoyed reading through the end-of-chapter exercises, which presented real-world examples, not abstract physics puzzles. I was also pleased to see the out-of-the-box question asking students to estimate the total lifetime cost of building and launching a space satellite. Most, if not all, contemporary professional astronomers need to tackle such questions of cost analysis.
Two other good recent multiwavelength treatments are George Rieke’s Measuring the Universe: A Multiwavelength Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Edmund Sutton’s Observational Astronomy: Techniques and Instrumentation (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Like Lawrence’s book, Rieke’s covers all the basics, but it is more geared to graduate-level work. And it features the traditional separation of wavelength regimes. In Measuring the Universe, there is much more physics, leading to a large number of equations that interrupt the flow of the text. Observational Astronomy is an intense read adapted from a graduate course aimed at both the theorist and the observer. It also separates the wavelength regimes and is more mathematically oriented; in particular, it provides a greater coverage of statistics. Nice sections on cosmic-ray, neutrino, and gravitational-wave detectors also make it suitable for the experimental physicist.
The theorist may do better with Sutton or even Rieke. But the student will find that Lawrence hits all the vital points, and the observer will find that everything he mentions is of practical value.
Kim Weaver is an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She works on multiwavelength observations of active galactic nuclei and starburst galaxies.
