Starwatchers

A vast and captivating blend of history, science and culture that delves into the heart of humanity's relationship with the cosmos.

Baker leads us on an exhilarating exploration of the other worlds of our solar system, and the distant stars and galaxies beyond. From the royal stargazers of ancient Babylon to the space probes and orbital telescopes of today, this is the fascinating story of how we've been touched by the cosmos across human history. My head is still reeling!

Humans understand the universe better now than at any point in our history. But as Joanne Baker reminds us, our knowledge of celestial bodies is as dependent on our own stories as it is on the laws of mathematics and physics. The messages of the cosmos matter to us, so we map the night sky and chart its denizens — and in doing so, we imbue those objects with meaning, connecting them to our own places in our own times. Starwatchers is a friendly, contemplative journey through the history of science , illuminating how astronomy connects us to the stars, but also to each other

A thoughtful blend of science and history ... Carries worrying warnings about what humans are doing in space today

Tenderly written , it's one of those books that has the precious virtue of making the familiar interesting all over again

Delightful ... [Baker] doesn't just recite what we have learned about the universe; she tells the stories of the starwatchers , people past and present, of many different cultures, whose work we use today when we try to understand the things in the sky ... It's great fun to read about what our ancestors expected to see in the stars . And it helps us in our own work to recognise and account for our own hopes and fears

Combines scientific expertise with vivid storytelling and a childlike wonder that shines on every page ... By exploring every aspect of "what draws us to the heavens and how can we as humans make sense of all that lies there?", Baker weaves stories of science, imagination and belief into a cosmic journey that leaves you breathless - just as if you had contemplated the night sky itself

Joanne Baker is a writer and editor. She holds a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Sydney and master’s degrees in natural sciences and landscape architecture from the Universities of Cambridge and Greenwich. Baker has a background in astronomy research, where she studied quasars, black holes, galaxy evolution, and cosmology. She has been a NASA Hubble Fellow at the University of California, a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. She has written three books on physics and edited for Nature and Science magazines.