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Originally published in 1984

From the original publication:
The Saturn system is the most complex in the solar system, and this book is to summarize it all: the planet, rings, satellites, the magnetospheres, and the interaction with the interplanetary medium. The effective date of the material is approximately November 1983.

Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico helped establish the field of archaeoastronomy, and it remains the standard introduction to this subject. Combining basic astronomy with archaeological and ethnological data, it presented a readable and entertaining synthesis of all that was known of ancient astronomy in the western hemisphere as of 1980.

In this revised edition, Anthony Aveni draws on his own and others' discoveries of the past twenty years to bring the Skywatchers story up to the present. He offers new data and interpretations in many areas, including:

• The study of Mesoamerican time and calendrical systems and their unprecedented continuity in contemporary Mesoamerican culture
• The connections between Precolumbian religion, astrology, and scientific, quantitative astronomy
• The relationship between Highland Mexico and the world of the Maya and the state of Pan-American scientific practices
• The use of personal computer software for computing astronomical data

With this updated information, Skywatchers will serve a new generation of general and scholarly readers and will be useful in courses on archaeoastronomy, astronomy, history of astronomy, history of science, anthropology, archaeology, and world religions.

Exposes how emotion, memory, and national pride shape the stories we tell about science, animals, and the history of the “race to space”

Before humans ever left Earth’s atmosphere, a handful of primates paved the way—earning fame and fascination but leaving behind a complicated and often highly debated legacy. As the Cold War intensified, the US space program turned to monkeys—Able, Baker, Ham, and Enos—to test and explore the limits of human survival in space. These animals became media sensations, museum exhibits, and symbols of American ingenuity, even as their suffering was often overlooked.

With insight and empathy, Lynch unpacks the stories we tell about these primates and how they are remembered through culture and time, both modern and historically. Lynch argues that the public memory of these animals often justifies their use in the name of scientific progress. Sometimes they are portrayed as tools, other times as human stand-ins, and frequently as objects of sympathy—but rarely as subjects of critique.

Lynch shows how feelings—compassion, cuteness, patriotism, and the technological sublime—shape the stories we tell about these animals and the ethical frameworks we build around them. Each chapter focuses on a different genre of memory-making, from newspaper and photojournalism to museum exhibits, children’s literature, and fictional films.

By reframing these animal pioneers, Lynch uncovers the ethical and emotional narratives that shape how we remember science. Space Monkeys! is a vital reflection on memory, identity, and the more-than-human costs of progress. 
 

An hourly guide that tracks twenty-four stars, stellar clusters, and constellations across the sky to reveal their luminous lives and lore.

Over the course of a day, the constellations slowly shift, rising in the east and setting in the west, due to Earth’s rotation. A full turn of the celestial sphere, that bowl above us where the stars seemingly appear fixed to the surface, is completed once every twenty-four hours. In fact, the stars inspired the twenty-four-hour day, and one star, our Sun, rules the circadian rhythms of all life on our planet. This short book sweeps through the celestial sphere hour by hour, introducing a remarkable cast of stellar characters with each chapter. Celebrated science writer Marcia Bartusiak and mathematician Stephen Lowe blend practical astronomy with fascinating history to share unique cosmological stories.  

This husband and wife team explain that observers have long split the sky into twenty-four hours of right ascension—a celestial equivalent of longitude and a universal scheme for locating cosmological objects. Each chapter of Star Day presents a single right ascension hour, from the stellar death of S Andromedae (zeroth hour)—an explosion that helped reveal the size of the universe—to Scheat (twenty-third hour), an aging red giant. Twice the mass of the Sun and some 1,500 times as bright, Scheat sometimes guides amateur astronomers to distant galaxies. In between, we learn about humans’ pole star, Polaris (second hour), and meet the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy (seventeenth hour). By the end of our star day, we will appreciate both our own stellar origins and the fragile and deep connections between human civilizations and the ever-changing heavens. Star Day reminds us that wonder and discovery are easily available, all for the simple price of looking up.

For each chapter, artist Matthew Green has depicted these stellar scenes with entrancing pen-and-ink drawings. Working together to narrate and illustrate these stars' stories, Bartusiak, Lowe, and Green have created an engaging read that is a perfect way to spend an hour or two—and a true gift to both seasoned skywatchers and curious beginners.