I know I’ve been prattling on about writing a book forever, but I think I might have finally found a topic that makes sense.
I was looking at my Astronomy notes and noticed that there is a lot of cool stuff there that people ought to know. In a typical astronomy book you get a lot of pictures of things in space (that you’ll never see in your backyard telescope, by the way) and charts of the constellations. That’s all great, but there is more to Astronomy than star-gazing. Astronomy is a science.
In my Astronomy class, we’ve been learning a lot about the science of Astronomy. We have not learned, for instance, how far away the Earth is from any particular star. This is something you can pull from any astronomy text. But what we have learned is how to determine the our distance from one, whether that star is moving closer or farther away, and what direction it is spinning, all based on what we know of the pinprick of light that bleeds through our atmosphere.
This kind of practical scientific knowledge gives us a foundation for what astronomers know about our universe. I think that if I could produce a book that brought this information to the layman, it would be interesting and well-received.
Wouldn’t you want to read such a book? Want to edit?
