Very impressive and entertaining work by Dr. Hirshfeld. The amount of historical research that must have gone into this book is stunning. He covers over 2,000 years of the history of astronomy and astronomers, from Aristarchus to Ptolemy to Copernicus to the 19th Century and into the modern era. And he puts it together is an extremely readable and compelling way.

Perhaps the single best thing about the book is how the author doesn't shy away from describing the science and technology at the root of the human story he is telling, yet he presents it all in a way that is understandable and interesting whether you are an expert or a novice.

I have read many books and articles on the history of astronomy in the past, and hands down this is one of my absolute favorites.

I highly recommend and thoroughly enjoyed this delightful spellbinding journey through the history and science of astronomy and its quest to find stellar parallax. Parallax is full of humor, suspense and intrigue with insight into the creativity, genius, skill, perseverance and sometimes quirkiness of astronomy's founding fathers. I was fascinated by the human story, often all too human but more often inspirational, of each contributor in this scientific endeavor from the early Greeks through the Renaissance to 19th century Europe. Hirshfeld gives the reader an intimate sense of each of these great astronomers(Aristarchus, Copernicus, Gallileo, Kepler, Newton, Hooke, Bradley and many more) and what each contributed and made them tick.

Hirshfeld tells an impressive tale of the scientific mind and engineering skills, and their challenges, pursuits and perseverance against all obstacles, technical and political, to discover the scientific truths that the earth revolves around the sun and distances to the stars. The tale is wrought with pitfalls due to the enormity of the scale of the universe, the diversity of stars, the technological difficulty in inventing and improving the telescope and its usability, reliability and resolution in its early incarnations, and many preconceived misleading notions and an enormity of other stumbling blocks.

Reading Parallax, I imagined the frustration for over 2000 years knowing the basic principle of stellar parallax - measure the shift in position of a star relative to its background stars from opposite sides of the earth's orbit and geometry yields its distance - and not having the technology to measure it, for even the closest stars are very far away and therefore have very small parallaxes to resolve. Parallax gave me a sense of admiration for those early astronomers and their inspiration, insight, foresight and dogged determination, often in dire circumstances.

Alan Hirshfeld has a knack for helping the reader to visualize his descriptions of technical, physics and telescopic concepts and equipment. There are also great diagrams illustrating technical concepts and mechanical equipment that enhanced my reading experience, along with engaging tales of how telescopic equipment was invented, constructed and used over the centuries in pursuit of stellar parallax. Hirshfeld is especially charming when he relates his personal delightful stories from aspiring young amateur astronomer to professional astronomer and physics teacher.

Parallax is a compelling, informative, insightful and often humorous tale of the people, science and technology that race to find the parallax of a star. Parallax is a great scientific who-done-it, building on each scientist, their obstacles and innovations, giving the reader the anticipation of what scientist with what equipment will solve the technological challenge of measuring stellar parallax. I learned a lot of fun and interesting things about the people involved, the evolution of human ideas and technology, and the history of the pursuit.

Along the lines of Longitude, where Dava Sobel took us on a walk through astronomical history with the focus on the effort to determine longitude at sea, Hirshfeld's "Parallax" is an engaging historical survey concentrating on efforts to detect that minute wobble of stars. Hirshfeld focuses on the personalities and people - which makes this story enjoyable and even riveting.

Copernicus' view of the heavens had long since prevailed - no serious person of science doubted that the Earth and planets orbited the sun. However, there was no concrete scientific evidence to prove the Copernican view. The acid test of the Earth's motion, slight displacement of stars in June and December, when the Earth is on opposite sides of its orbit, had still not been detected. Hirshfeld traces the story from the earliest Greeks through Hooke, Newton, Bessel, Bradley and many others. It's a great story, well told.

This is NOT to be purchased unless you are very advanced in astronomy. I was hoping for a rework of the "New General Catalog" and this, as a gift, was way beyond me. I feel the description of this tomb should reflect its complexity

I bought this book because I was looking for a reference for all the double stars and deep sky objects shown in SkyAtlas 2000.0 charts that I could not find listed or old coordinates used in Burnham's Celestial Handbook made difficult to tell which is which. This is the one. For every object I am looking for data, this reference shows the mag, size, seperation. For galaxies it also lists the brightness, which is usefull and will help you to understand why you have spent endless nights searching for a mag 9.5 galaxy only to discover it's brightness is only mag 10.5 because it's light is spread over such a wide area. This is not a star chart format book, it is a data reference listed in order of RA for double stars and in order of NGC # for most everything else. There is a notes column that will cross reference the M objects, but you cannot look them up unless you have the NGC #. It's easy really, if you have a good set of charts that you are starting from. If you want to know all about the objects by constellation, get the three books that make up the set of Burnham's. Even though they are 1950 coordianates, the will teach you more than you ever thought you could know about the sky. Use this as a current data reference to fill in the blind spots.

This book contains hundreds of stars, down and including the magnitude 8.0. It is 99.999% accurate and no smudges! I recomend this book to anyone who is searching the stellar realm of the universe.