Planetary Pioneers: The Mapping of Our Solar System - Hardcover

Quarmby, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846245486 ISBN 13: 9781846245480

Publisher: Book Guild Publishing Ltd, 2011

Synopsis

Did you know?

- A Chinese astronomer, Gan De, spotted one of Jupiter's moons with his naked eye some two thousand years before Galileo viewed four of the moons through a telescope in 1610. - The highest mountain in the Solar System is Olympus Mons on Mars - it is a little under three times as tall as Mount Everest. - Pluto, first discovered in 1930, was demoted to a 'dwarf planet' in 2006.

In Planetary Pioneers, physicist, computer technologist and amateur astronomer David Quarmby paints a vivid picture of each of the planets and tells the extraordinary stories of the people who discovered and mapped them - from trailblazing pioneers such as Coperernicus and Galileo to gentleman amateurs such as William Herschel. Richly illustrated and clearly written, this is the perfect introduction to the wonders of the Solar System

About this title

About the Author

David Quarmby is himself quite a trailblazer. Born in Huddersfield, he studied physics at University College London and went on to gain a doctorate in 'Pattern Recognition using Living Machines'. He worked as a lecturer at Loughborough University and in the 1980s helped set up an innovative electronics company on campus, Loughborough Sound Images, which created one of the world s first speech synthesisers. After his retirement from the company, David Quarmby went to live in Edinburgh with his wife, Rhoda, where he now lives. He has an old shepherd's cottage in the nearby Scottish Borders where he is able to view night skies that are almost entirely free of light pollution.

Edition details

• Publisher: Book Guild Publishing Ltd
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1846245486
• ISBN 13: 9781846245480
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 64