Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos

by Alan W. Hirshfeld

How can we measure the distance to a star? Beginning in ancient Greece, history's greatest scientific minds applied themselves to the problem in vain. Not until the nineteenth century would three men, armed with the best telescopes of their age, race to conquer this astronomical Everest. Parallax tells the fast-moving story of their contest, which ended in a dead heat.

Against a sweeping backdrop filled with kidnappings, dramatic rescue, swordplay, madness, and bitter rivalry, Alan W. Hirshfeld brings to life the heroes -- and heroines -- of this remarkable chapter in history. Characters include the destitute boy plucked from a collapsed building who grew up to become the world's greatest telescope maker; the hot-tempered Dane whose nose was lopped off in a duel over mathematics; a merchant's apprentice forced to choose between the lure of money and his passion for astronomy; and the musician who astounded the world by discovering a new planet from his own backyard.

Generously illustrated with period engravings and paintings, Parallax is an unforgettable ride through time and space.

Genres: Science, History, Astronomy, Nonfiction, History Of Science, Space

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Jeff Genest]

If you have any interest in astronomy you will find this book engaging as it traces the 2000 year history in search of reliable methods and increasingly more equipment to measure the distance to the stars. While the concept of how parallax works is simple, anyone with some basic trig can understand it, stellar distances are so enormous that small errors in measurement throw the calculations way off. That may seem obvious to a modern scientist but it was no so apparent to the men and women whose passion to explore the stars got us to where we are today.

[Lydia · Rating 4 out of 5]

My dad gave me this book when it first came out, while I was in high school. The mathy details were over my head then, but I loved the history stuff--and it convinced me to start my first year of college with a class on science journalism. Well, that career path ended almost as soon as it began. And, it turns out, my eyes still glaze over at the math formulas and detailed specs for telescopes in this book. But, I get the general idea, and love everything else about it. Plus the author reminds me a lot of my dad, so, warm fuzzies.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an exciting chronicle of humanity's millennia-long quest to measure the distance to the stars. Hirshfeld starts in Ancient Greece and finishes with Friedrich Bessel's successful measurement of the parallax of 61 Cygni. Along the way, he details how each successive astronomer (including such names as Galileo, Tycho, Hooke, and Herschel) applied the best telescopes of their day to the task of measuring the cosmos. This makes the book not only a fascinating astronomical history read, but you will learn something about optics as well.
As a side note, this book has not been updated in about 20 years, so I decided to read further about the progress made in stellar parallax measurement just in this century. In Hirshfeld's epilogue, he mentions several spacecraft that were then in development, including GAIA, which launched in 2013 and is well on its way to its goal of measuring a billion stars. NASA's SIM and FAME missions never launched. However, perhaps the most remarkable development in the history of parallax measurement came from the New Horizons probe, which explored Pluto in 2015. Not long after this feat, a telescope on board that spacecraft took an image of Proxima Centauri, our solar system's nearest stellar neighbor. It was compared to images taken from Earth, and the result was absolutely remarkable- it showed a stunningly obvious parallax shift against the background stars. Two thousand years humans spent looking for a shift of mere fractions of an arcsecond- and here is one that you can trace with your finger!
Enough of the nerd rant. Read the book!

[Evan Þ. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ever since Copernicus, astronomers have been hunting for stellar parallax. Their not finding it was the biggest argument against Copernicus's theory for over a century. Of course, in reality, it was far too small for anyone to find it till the 1830's - but accepting that meant accepting the stars were much farther away than anyone thought at the time. And even in the 1830's, only a few of the closest stars could be measured... and the closest, Alpha Centauri, was invisible till the British finally built an observatory in South Africa.

Hirshfeld tells this interesting story with a sweep through the centuries, and detours into things like the Galileo Affair and the lives of various astronomers who touched the story of parallax measurement. It's a fine story, if much of it is quickly told. But I'm not quite sure of how Hirshfeld tells it. I can only recognize one point against him: he omits Airy disks, up until the 1800's one of the biggest arguments against the stars being far enough away that parallax could be undetected. But if that's the one point I know, what other omissions might be lurking undetected?

[Peter Corrigan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Amazon review on July 15, 2018: Will make you want to dust off your telescope!

Really good, lucid and readable science history with all kinds of insight into the many impressive people who wrestled with the 'problem' of describing the universe and our position in it. There are names you will definitely know; Brahe, Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo but many you will not; Hipparchus, Bradley, Bessel, Struve and others. There are lots of nice drawings of the instruments used back then and numerous diagrams to explain the concepts of parallax. I struggle to not give 5 stars since I feel a need to reserve those for the really extraordinary books, but a 4.5 for sure and I am not sure anyone could have done much better with the subject itself. It really did make me want to use the telescope I received a while back, but I still haven't!

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Accurate, precise, yet an absolute pageturner. Full of scientific and personal details I had not known, but now see I very much wanted to know. For example, outstanding discussion of how Bradley turned failure into a scientific revolution -- the careful mind seeing a tiny unexpected feature while looking for something completely different.

[Paul Noël · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating story of the tireless efforts by individuals, to be able to measure the parallax of stars and in doing so, prove the heliocentric model of the universe over the geocentric one. The parallax of even the nearest stars are so more that many failed in their quest but helped others to do so. An excellent example of science being built on the shoulders of giants.

[Pete Fleurant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read for the curious who want to know how humans learned and determined the distance to the closest stars. It was a very difficult and very human struggle.

A must read for every armature astronomer.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of course I grew up knowing that the Earth orbited the Sun and I never thought about what it took to prove that. Wow, what a book! It explains the quest for that proof.

[Harrison Dohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written, enjoyable, and accurate presentation of the topic.

[Craig Hayward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful combination of adventure, science, and reality show as history's greatest astronomers compete to measure the stars' parallax and gauge the true scale of the universe.

[Ari · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half drags a bit -- the author insists on retelling the story of pre-Copernican astronomy. Even in this part of the book, however, I learned a bit. The story gets much better in the second half. There's a lot of material I had never seen before about the evolution of observing practice from Tycho to Bessel.

Several of the anecdotes were new to me.

There is a chapter on Bradley's discovery of the aberration of light. (Parallax is a change in apparent position due to change in the observer's position -- aberration is a change due to observer's velocity.)

He also highlights something I had never heard of before. Newton and friends managed to estimate the distance to Sirius, by an indirect process. First, they assumed Sirius and the Sun have equal apparent magnitude. Next, they estimated the relative brightness of Sirius and Saturn, and calculated the relative brightness of Saturn and the Sun by theoretical means. This ultimately got an estimate for the distance to Sirius within a factor of two -- which seems very good, given how crude the method was.

Many chapters start with autobiographical asides. I assume this is to humanize the author, but I want to hear about the topic, not the author, and don't need to hear about what it's like to drive to Arecibo.

[Aina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mind-boggling story of a quest (that took hundreds of years, many exceptionally brilliant astronomers and a technological revolution in the telescope making) to measure a star parallax, a change in the apparent position of a star when viewed from the opposite ends of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. "In this book, you will peer over the shoulders of these astronomers as they investigate the heavens. You will have the opportunity to commiserate with them in their crushing failures and revel in their rare successes. You will read of kidnappings, dramatic rescues, swordplay, madness, professional jealousy, hypochondria, and enough angst to fill a universe." The book also contains quite a bit of information that is not a common knowledge, so even as a seasoned astronomer you will learn something new. Even if you don't, this book is literally like a dessert for your brain, so delicious to read!

[Daisy2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting history. I love it that the book included names of individuals whose life of poverty did not prevent them from making their mark in science. We often hear of the poor struggling artist but when I mention the poor scientist that struggled and yet made their mark people chuckle.

[ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was very interesting, but for the scientifically minded. It has a bit of physics and calculus in it. Otherwise, it looked at the social impact astronomy has had on the western world in a chronological way.

[Bird · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another science history, this is of astronomers and the, um, well can't call it a race if it lasted a millenia, eh? But that aside, fascinating. If you don't want to name your kid, or someone else's, Tycho Brahe after reading this you weren't paying attention.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit verbose but enjoyable. A bit like reading a dozen biographies with a common thread. Which is wahat one would expect.

[Sherin Samir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes difficult to comment on the extent of admiration book and what manner the author in writing, this book from that group

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly inspiring story of the struggles in observational Astronomy. Great read!

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

full of good random facts for non astronomers, decent writer, a little scattered