Editorial Review:
This unique and informative text describes how stars are classified according to their spectral qualities and temperature. James Kaler explains the alphabet of stellar astronomy, running from cool M stars to hot O stars, and tells the story of their evolution. Before embarking on a voyage of cosmic discovery, the author discusses the fundamental properties of stars, their atomic structure and the formation of spectra. Then, Kaler considers each star type individually and explores its spectra in detail. A review of unusual, hard-to-classify stars, and a discussion of data related to the birth, life and death of stars round out the text. This book is an important resource for all amateur astronomers and students of astronomy. Professionals will find it a refreshing read as well.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Provides limited insights into the physical processes driving stars..  2008-11-29
This book is an excellent qualitative introduction to spectroscopy and the spectral sequence. It offers more detail than an introductory level astronomy course, however it only presents experimental spectroscopic results, and little mathematics. Instead it relies on plausibilty arguments and physical intuition. Working through the spectral sequence, it describes the various phenomenoma observed at each location on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. I often found it helpful to keep a printed out H-R diagram and a periodic table on hand while I read this book. While it is sufficient for some advanced amateur astronomers, it might not be quite satisfying to a mathematically sophisticated reader with a background in physics who wouldn't feel uncomfortable with more mathematical detail. That being said, it might be worth reading just to get a feel for what sorts of phenomena are out there before reading a more sophisticated book on similar astrophysical topics.
Stars and their Spectra: An introduction to the spectral sequence  2007-09-26
I am in the process of building a spectroscope to be used in our astronomy club's 14 inch Celestron. This book has been a great source of technical information needed to both understand how they work. Subsequently it will be a useful reference should we be able to take spectrophotos and compare them to spectra in the book. Highly recommended.
Excellent book with terribly reproduced graphic images - buy the earlier edition 2006-11-03
As others have indicated in their reviews, this is an excellent book. I do have a complaint with
the paperback reissue however - the images are very poorly reproduced from the earlier edition. I
have seen the earlier edition where the images are clear, and unfortunately, many of the reproductions of spectra
in the later edition are so poor that it is impossible to see the features discussed in the text.
The paperback edition is an embarassment to the Cambridge University Press which usually produces very high
quality books. If you can, you should obtain the earlier edition instead of purchasing the reissued
paperback edition.
Very engaging and makes a good reference too 2003-07-08
"Stars and their Spectra" is overall a significantly better read than Kaler's earlier work "Stars", which touched on many topics but didn't dive into any of them satisfyingly enough. This book delivers a thorough yet introductory coverage of the science of stellar spectroscopy. As an added bonus, it's very well-written and is great fun to read cover to cover. Kaler clearly harbors great enthusiasm for this subject, particularly when he discusses extreme stars like supergiants and white dwarfs.Kaler spends the first eighty pages or so covering the basics of how stars work, spectral theory, and history of the modern scheme of spectral classification (OBAFGKM, easily remembered by the popular mnemonic Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me). The meat of the book comes next: a chapter devoted to each letter of the sequence, starting from the cool M stars and working up to the ultra-hot O stars. Here Kaler goes into significant detail on the defining characteristics of each class and how those characteristics manifest themselves physically. We learn how dwarfs, giants, and supergiants may share a spectral class but are fundamentally different (the giants and supergiants almost always aged into that spectral class from a different one). A wealth of other information on each class is presented. We finish up with stars that don't really appear on the regular H-R diagram, such as white dwarfs and neutron stars. Kaler also gives a nice overview at the end of how stars journey along the H-R diagram, changing spectral classes as they age and their internal fusion engines deplete their fuel. I see stars of a myriad of different colors through my telescope. A few are stunning and a great many come in attractive pairs or multiples. Yet visually they're all points of light with little meaning. It was fascinating to see how much can be learned from analyzing the detailed characteristics of a star's light by dispersing it in a spectrograph. Due to the advancements in this science and the aggregation of data points on the modern H-R diagram, it is often possible to guage a star's size, age, chemical composition, and distance solely from the qualities of its light. I sell most books after I read them but this one's a keeper and has a permanent spot on the shelf!
How to make astrophysics interesting and comprehensible 2001-02-26
If you think that star spectrography is an obscure and boring field of research reserved to people with a Cambridge degree, well, you're wrong, and here's why. "Stars And Their Spectra" is yet another marvelous book by James Kaler one of the leading (and still the most underrated!) divulgator of stellar astronomy. It's the natural follow-up of "Stars", Kaler's book on the birth, evolution and death of (guess what?) stars. It explains how the light coming from objects distants thousands of light-years (or more) does contains a wealth of informations on the nature of those little points of light in the night sky. The classification of spectral data, the nature of emission and absorbtion lines, the whole array of concpet behind the analisys of stellar light, it's all presented in a clear manner, with great examples and the right amount of illustrations. Moreover, Kaler it's a divulgator but a scientist too, and he never insults the intelligence of the reader trying to banalize the subject matter. Based on a series of articles appeared on "Sky And Telescope", "The Stars And Their Spectra" will make turn you instantly in an amateur spectrographer...
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