Voyages Through the Universe

Hi! I am also one of Andrew Fraknoi's former students and we used this book in our class. It's awesome! It is very well written and he makes it very easy to understand everything about the planets and the Universe. He is also an awesome teacher so if you have the opportunity to take one of his ASTRO classes at Foothill College-you should take it!

If you have any interest in Astronomy, this is a must have book for an introduction to the subject. It is a non-mathematical introduction to the subject and is extremely well written. The book was intended for a non-major science subject in college, but even if you are not attending a class on the subject, this is still a great book to learn from. I personally don't have the hard cover edition but I have the paper back edition. I plan to purchase the hard cover edition when I have the money for it. I can expand a little on the subject matter of the paperback edition, which I'm sure is simply a stripped down version of the hard cover book. It covers the history of astronomy to the latest theories in the field. Such topics as gravity, planets, the Sun, stars, thermo-nuclear fusion, black holes and quasars are explained in a easy to digest manner. I found the topic of how thermo-nuclear fusion especially facinating as I always wondered how stars (like our sun) generated it's energy, I knew it was fusion but did not understand how it functioned, all was made clear to me.There are also plenty of visual aides and pictures in book. A large majority of images are directly from Hubble Space Telescope that will leave you breathless at the beauty and vastness of space. The book also directs you to websites that will expand on the material covered in the book. Great stuff!Fraknoi, Morrison and Wolff have done a tremendous job in writing this book. Kudos to the authors for taking to the time to do it right.

This book is great if you want to get a feel for all the different astronomical objects, what they are and how it all fits together.  I like the way the authors start with the Earth and then move on to the other planets, the stars, galaxies, clusters and eventually to Relativity and the Big Bang, without digging too much into the details.  It's a thought-provoking book and I recommend it to anyone who is eager to get into the field.

I'm one of Andrew Fraknoi's student at Foothill and this book is as excellent as his lectures there. It's simply, however, in-depth written book with several new fantastic pictures. It should be a part of every home library

Simple, yet fairly in-depth, and has lots of good pictures to help illustrate the concepts. Easy enough reading for the budding astronomer to use, but also provides detailed information useful for more complicated research. Everthing from focal length to electron emission!