by Ben Shadick (Heritage House, 2007; 28 pages; $16.95 Canada, $12.95 U.S.)
Review by Karen Larson
The night sky is full of starry friends. The trouble is that most city folk (even the sailors among us) are unfamiliar with these regular visitors. For those, like me, who would like to get to know the night stars – as well as for the advanced stargazers among us – the Skywatchers 08 calendar is a treasure. You could hang this calendar on the wall, I suppose, but it’s going to be much more useful to me as a training tool on the boat…out there where the sky is black and the stars are the brightest.
Author Stan Shadick teaches astronomy courses at the University of Saskatchewan and tells the recreational stargazers among us: “I hope to share with the reader some of the excitement of recent astronomical discoveries, along with the charm of ancient tales and First Nations legends about the constellations.” How does he propose to do this? Flip to any page of this calendar and you’ll understand instantly.
Each calendar page has a notation on every day of the month, with such useful information as this one selected randomly for January 23: “The ancient Greek and Roman mythmakers imagined that Cetus constellation depicted a whale. The great beast was sent by Neptune to ravish the coast of Ethiopia after Queen Cassiopeia bragged that she was more beautiful than Neptune’s nymphs.” The following day features a more technical blurb: “About 4 hours after sunset, look for Saturn rising above the eastern horizon. The ringed planet will be just 3 degrees to the left of the waning gibbous Moon, as shown on the map below.”
With the help of a small map in the lower corner, you should be able to find Saturn, as promised. And with the full-sized image of the Chicago night skyline, you should be able to recognize the stars in the January night sky. Flip through the calendar pages and the skylines change from Toronto to London to Vancouver to Baltimore and so on.
This isn’t just a 12-page full-color calendar for the wall. The publishers thoughtfully added pages so Ben Shadick could give us additional background, trivia, resources for stargazers, full-sky maps by season, and planetary conjunctions of interest (Saturn and Mars will be very close together on July 10, for example).
If you’re in Canada, Europe, or the northern half of the United States (anywhere between the 37th and 60th parallels), this calendar will be extremely useful every month of the year. Don’t be dismayed that we received this gem late in the year and its review doesn’t appear until the February newsletter. For those who are in the northern part of the northern hemisphere, it’s been a bit chilly for stargazing anyway. Spring is on the way. Now’s the time to get the calendar.
