Editorial Review:
THE AMATEUR STARGAZER'S ULTIMATE HOME COMPANION365 Starry Nights is a unique and fascinating introduction to astronomy designed to give you a complete, clear picture of the sky every night of the year. Divided into 365 concise, illustrated essays, it focuses on the aesthetic as well as the scientific aspects of stargazing. It offers the most up-to-date information available, with hundreds of charts, drawings, and maps-that take you beyond the visible canopy of stars and constellations into the unseen realm of nebulae and galaxies. This simple yet substantial text is full of critical information and helpful hints on how to observe the stars; describe their position; calculate their age, brightness, and distance; and much more. Whether you observe the sky with a telescope or the naked eye, 365 Starry Nights makes the infinite intimate and brings the heavens within your grasp. Keep this invaluable, informative guide close at hand, and you'll find that the sky is the limit 365 nights a year.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Great introduction to looking at the night sky  2008-01-25
This is a great book. Full of fascinating facts. This is the best Astronomy 101 text I have read. It is easy to just go to the paragraph you need, it is all very self contained and very accessible. Great illustrations! My only qualms with this book is that it says nothing of the planets. It recommend the software Pocket Star PC as a companion product.
Night Skies 2007-06-08
The book is really interesting. I like how everyday is covered for the month and how it explains what a person can see depending on where you live in the world.
The astronomy book I recommend most  2006-07-31
I have been in amateur astronomy for 17 years. "365" was one of my first books, and the one I purchase for friends who are clueless about the night sky. A wonderful introduction for the novice, or review for the experienced. Read it through and you'll be ready to give a planetarium show under the stars (or even in a planetarium). Its greatest shortcoming is the lack of an index, for which I remove one "star" from the rating. As planets are the "wanderers," you'll go elsewhere to find and study them (several web sites can help, or the astronomy magazines). The hand-drawn star charts in the book certainly suffice for learning the night sky. Again, the astronomy magazines are helpful in containing current charts for the season.
The book is not meant to read one night at a time, but in general guides you to what is a fun aspect of amateur astronomy: that the sky provides a calendar, a sense of changing seasons. This is the strength of the book: why your view of the sky changes over time, that is, over the course of the night and over the course of days to months, and changes with your location on earth. Raymo's writing is spectacular: his feet on Earth, his head in the universe!
A Classic for 25 Years for the New Star Gazer - Same edition - Reprinted 32 times and counting 2006-07-19
Chet Raymo's illustrated guide to the night sky, 365 Starry Nights, is a delightful introduction to star gazing with binoculars or the naked eye. (365 Starry Nights may be too basic for telescope viewing.) This guidebook targets the amateur, the new observer that must begin at the beginning by becoming acquainted with the major features in the night sky. Fortunately, with Raymo's guidebook it is not all that difficult making friends with the brighter stars, as well as their rather arbitrary groupings into constellations.
365 Starry Nights: An Introduction to Astronomy for Every Night of the Year provides hundreds of hand-drawn sky charts, drawings, and maps that bring the Northern Hemisphere night sky alive. Simply turn to the page matching the date and begin reading. Raymo emphasizes those objects and starry patterns most visible, and thereby most easily learned by the new amateur. And learning the key features must come first. Star hopping from a known star to fainter stars or to Messier objects comes later.
Raymo's text covers a wealth of astronomical topics, not in detail, but sufficiently so for a new observer. Initially, I expected to move chronologically through the nights, but I quickly found myself enthusiastically jumping around from season to season, constellation to constellation, and topic to topic.
Most drawings highlight a small section of the sky, centered about a seasonal constellation. Other drawings illustrate magnified views of more distant stars and galaxies. Yet other charts and graphs help explain various astronomical concepts such as the apparent magnitude scale, dark line spectrum of stars, celestial navigation, Cepheid variables, and the spatial positions of the larger globular clusters associated with the Milky Way.
Key point: 365 Starry Nights is for the new amateur and it is a book that you will outgrow, perhaps fairly quickly. Even in the beginning you will probably occasionally need a more advanced guidebook and sky map to supplement Raymo's discussions.
My younger daughter, also a new amateur observer, bought a new copy of 365 Starry Nights at list price at the NASA visitors center in Houston. Her savvy father bought elsewhere a used copy in good condition for a pittance.
Accessible Astronomy 2006-06-09
This book is such a friendly introduction to astronomy. You are given something to observe and think about each night of the year in the 365 essays, which are written in a personal, entertaining way. By all means purchase the book if you like it-- it's a great companion for the beginning skywatcher and lively reading for anyone interested in the night sky.
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