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RR 2015/064 Encyclopedia of the History of Astronomy and Astrophysics David Leverington Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2013 xi + 521 pp. ISBN 978 0 521 89994 9 £45 $75
Keywords Astronomy, Astrophysics, Encyclopedias, History
Review DOI 10.1108/RR-10-2014-0292
The Encyclopedia of the History of Astronomy and Astrophysics is written by David Leverington, author of similar titles including A History of Astronomy from 1890 to Present (Leverington, 1996) and Babylon to Voyager and Beyond: A History of Planetary Astronomy (Leverington, 2003). Leverington has a degree in Physics from Oxford University and has worked extensively in the space industry.
This work is not organized as a typical encyclopedia with an alphabetical arrangement of entries. Rather the work is divided into ten subject areas, each containing two or three chapters, further broken down into main topics.
Part 1, General Astronomy, discusses the ancient astronomy (pre-telescope) of various geographic regions (Babylon, China, Egypt, Greece, Islamic nations, North America, etc.). Each region is addressed in one to two pages, with Greek astronomy receiving up to four pages. The second chapter is a period overview starting in the seventeenth century and going through to the present. Oddly, the last chapter is a one-page entry on the International Astronomical Union (IAU). What is strange is that there is no mention of any other key astronomy organizations in the book, such as the American Astronomical Society, which...