Patrick Moore's Guide to the 1999 Total Eclipse

Buy this excellent scientific guide and you can experience the warm feeling that comes from knowing that all the author's royalties are going to the South Downs Planetarium Trust, an ambitious educational charity. (Let us hope Moore had a good agent.) Eschewing the token passages on astrology, myths and legends that mar the more try-hard guides, Moore still somehow brings a real sense of occasion and wonder to his strictly scientific account of eclipses and related phenomena. It's a sleight-of-hand readers of his excellent recent Patrick Moore on Mars will be familiar with. The black-and-white photographic plates are handsome, the maps--reduced to near illegibility--are not. Every guide warns of the risks of eye damage associated with observing the sun, but Moore's advice is more cogent and constructive than most. -- Simon Ings