Many of you who are experienced amateur astronomers know intimately Burnham's Celestial Handbook , the observing guide originally written in the 1960s by the curious astronomer Robert Burnham, Jr. The Handbook is still a mainstay of the libraries of many observers, a hodgepodge of observing data, tales and stories, photographs, poetry, and ephemera that introduced a whole generation to many deep-sky objects. It is still in heavy use by some although much of the data was outdated even when the book was published in the 60s, let alone for the Dover Publications update in the 1970s.

... us of a simple fact about life on Earth: You can't take any of it for granted. Here is the thing: It is kind of weird that we live on a planet that has almost equal amounts of open ocean and dry land. Every planet will have some degree of bumps on ...