David Levy’s Guide to Eclipses, Transits, and Occultations Author: David H Levy Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 978-0-521-16551-8 Price: £18.99 (Pb) 222pp
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As the discoverer of 23 comets (eight visually) and dozens of asteroids, David Levy is one of the great amateur astronomers of our age. His co-discovery of the comet that bruised Jupiter in 1994, Shoemaker–Levy 9, ensures his immortality in the astronomical annals. In recent years Levy has turned his considerable skills to being an author and when writing about comets, Clyde Tombaugh or Gene Shoemaker, there are no greater authorities. However, his new Guide to Eclipses, Transits, and Occultations is obviously not about comets and with authors like NASA’s Fred Espenak (and his colleagues) competing in the same field, this is a tough area to break into.

The first thing to say about this book is that it is not a heavyweight or a comprehensive tome. It consists of only 177 pages and some 60,000 words of text. Eighty percent of the book is about eclipses, mainly solar ones, with 25 pages covering eclipses of the Moon. Lunar occultations occupy nine pages and transits (of the Sun by Mercury or Venus) cover a mere seven. A scant two-thirds of a page is devoted to asteroid occultations.

Unfortunately, all of the illustrations are reproduced in a very drab monochrome. Most of the 56 photographs are uninspiring and, sadly, far too dark, hinting that the quality control at the printers was ineffective. You will certainly not gape in awe at a Miloslav Druckmüller solar corona masterpiece here!

On the positive side the book is very well written, in a friendly personal style, and therefore easy for a complete beginner to understand. However, the only part that really grabbed my attention was Chapter 17, which describes, over 14 pages, the 77 times that Levy has witnessed partial or total solar and lunar eclipses since 1959, when he was just eleven years old. Other than that section, regrettably, I found the book just a bit too basic for my taste.

Martin Mobberley