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A review by anita_bath
The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers by Emily M. Levesque
4.0
This was a very enjoyable read for me. The author does a fantastic job of making some pretty complex science accessible to the reader. One of my favorite parts was the accounts of viscachas watching sunsets with observers in the Chilean mountains. The idea that the simplicity and beauty of a sunset being able to captivate audiences across species is really fun for me.
There are quite a few mind boggling facts scattered throughout this book too. A few of my favorites being the size of a specific red giant that is roughly the same as Jupiter's orbit. Also, in a much more local sense, the amount of sheer data that the Rubin Observatory will generate. 30 TB/night is insane. And then being able to handle that with transfer speeds of 600Gigabits/s is just as insane. It will be fun to revisit this book in 10 years or so to compare state of the art technologies.
There are quite a few mind boggling facts scattered throughout this book too. A few of my favorites being the size of a specific red giant that is roughly the same as Jupiter's orbit. Also, in a much more local sense, the amount of sheer data that the Rubin Observatory will generate. 30 TB/night is insane. And then being able to handle that with transfer speeds of 600Gigabits/s is just as insane. It will be fun to revisit this book in 10 years or so to compare state of the art technologies.