This is a wonderful book for anyone who is interested in astronomy. It tells the story of seven astronomers who would come to be known as the 7 Samurai for their work in researching the topography of the cosmos. Come to find out, the 7 scientists discovered that the Milky Way (as well as the entire Virgo Supercluster) is being pulled towards a huge black "wall" in space that is over 450 million light years across. That phenomena has come to be known as the Great Attractor. Amazingly, the galaxies (and we, too) are moving towards it at an astonishingly 750 miles per second!

The book is filled with great facts about astronomy & its history (particularly the groundbreaking discoveries of the 20th century such as the Hubble Redshift). I learned a lot about how astronomy "works" and how the people involved in the field come to understand the data that is rendered them by their equipment.

One of the things that Dressler did very well was incorporate the "human element" to the celestial quest for knowledge. He described very nicely the personalities and quirks of the other 6 astronomers & also did a great job of being honest about what happened when things went wrong (often blaming himself for quarrels which broke out). I felt as though I knew all 7 of them personally by the end of the book. This is a nice feature in a science book as in this day & age so many books of the genre come across as cold and indifferent.

This is a great book. Buy it, read it and you just might feel compelled to invest in a telescope! (I did!)

The journey was marvelous and the serendipitous discovery of the enormous structure of the universe was dazzling. The Seven Samurai's formal output included the seminal paper by the Lynden-Bell et al. Et al. being the six other authors including Dressler. And what did they discover? Not what they were looking for. They found evidence of the biggest structures in the galaxy. In this case they found a "wall of galaxies" 200,000,000 light years distant that is accelerating the Milky Way and its companions toward it.

For me, the story of how the Seven Samurai who undertook a seven year journey of discovery had a more comfortable human scale. Consider there are a variety of projects. These range from the repair of earthquake-felled overpasses and releases of new versions of software package to - well, to treks of discovery like Lewis and Clark undertook. We follow their footsteps into intergalactic space.

One of the themes of this book is how a woman astronomer assembled a team of Americans, an Argentine, and an Englishman. The achievement was their ability to sustain a collaboration long enough for them to make and understand a discovery that fewer folks could not have accomplished.

Dressler interweaves the history, the scientific background and the process of contemporary science with his own personal story as a loner in a shared enterprise. I only wished that I could have had a time machine and sent him a copy of "Knights of the Tele-Roundtable" by Jacqueline Kostner. If he'd had it Alan and his colleagues might have been able to better prepare for the hardest part of science - the art of how to work together.

This is an astonishingly good book. Having spent most of my life ignoring the sky, based on simplistic reasoning of "what's the point?", besides the fact that I found it less than interesting squinching my eyeball into an eyepiece to look at spots of lights, I picked up this book and found that there was much more to Astronomy than met my eye. Having at the same time discovered that CCD (charge coupled device) cameras and compound Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes could photograph deep space objects instantly at a reasonable cost, and could be displayed and edited on my home computer with ease, I became addicted. Alan Dressler has the knack of explaining the complex in terms that can be understood, and he makes Astronomy come alive, particularly when it comes to deep space and the sheer magnitude of space-time. Photons really did leave that galaxy 10 million years ago and are just now reaching your retina, but what does the galaxy look like now and where is it in the time that has elapsed since those photons took off in your direction? You may find yourself rereading parts of it just to try and understand, but I have never seen many of these concepts better explained, and I have done some considerable amounts of reading since my awakening. I am getting a copy for my Astronomy professor (yes, I am auditing a college course despite the fact that it has been 25 years since I graduated from college)as I think that this book is just as useful for novices as professionals. You will not be disappointed, particularly if you are a novice and considering getting into the field of amateur astronomy (astrophotography in my case) but you have to learn the basics first before you charge out there with your brand spanking new telescope and camera. This is a very non-boring way of getting started and turned on! We really are made of the stuff of old stars! Dr. Dressler...you need to write some more books!