Emily Levesque: The Last Stargazers (2020)

 On a recent break with time for reading on my hands, I finally read Emily Levesque's The Last Stargazers <https://thelaststargazers.com/>. It is a popular science book styled as a collection of anecdotes about astronomical observation, but as that it is a whole history of the same, from the astronomers who had to draw their observations by hand (before photography) to the large and largely automated survey telescopes like the Sloane and the VRO, which make parts of human observation somewhat obsolete. This is, of course, narrative, but not with the story arc that felt a bit forced with Finkbeiner's A Grand and Bold Thing. Very entertaining and informative.

 

Levesque ends the book with the conclusion that while the big survey telescopes provide a wealth of astronomical data unimaginable a few decades ago and thus make the bulk of the type of observations that were done "by hand" in the past obsolete, they cannot do everything — the discoveries provided by them must be examined closer using more conventional observation methods. In many cases, these observations can be done from remote today, which is both more convenient and less exciting than it was, but the individual astronomer pointing a telescope to an interesting object in the sky still exists.

 

Also, the newly successful gravitational wave astronomy enables a new class of multi-messenger observations, where signals from different kinds of sources can be correlated to provide a more complete picture of some interesting events.

 

I like the book. By the examples of observation anecdotes it provides an entertaining and colourful history of astronomical observations, from the first telescopes and hand-drawn pictures to robotic survey telescopes. Levesque weaves in her own personal history as an astronomer, which makes all this even more relatable.

 

Now curious, I looked into one of of Levesque's actual research papers[1]; unsurprisingly, it isn't as accessible as a popular science book. It requires much more understanding of the current state of research than I have or would be willing to acquire, so I'll pass.

 

But even if I won't do it myself, I can totally understand the fascination that goes with digging into the details of this field of research, astronomy. For one, the universe is a strange and wondrous thing, and for another, how much science can conclude from the little we see of the stars is breathtaking.

 

[1] Lindsay DeMarchi, J.R. Sanders, Emily M. Levesque: Prospects for Multimessenger Observations of Thorne-Żytkow Objects (2021) <https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.03887>