Robert K. Buchheim

The book for scientifically-inclined amateur astronomers

What the reviewers have said:

   Dec 2007 Sky & Telescope magazine

   Nov 2007 BBC Sky at Night magazine

   Apr 2008 The Observatory (a British journal associated with Greenwich Observatory)

   All the way from Russia, a review posted on Cloudy Nights

Here's a description of an undergraduate seminar that is using The Sky is Your Laboratory as a textbook.

News story on Sky & Telescope website:

Small-Telescope Research on Display:  A summary of the 2010 Symposium of the Society for Astronomical Sciences

Short articles from the Sirius Astronomer (the newsletter of the Orange County Astronomers):

"Oh Dear:  Always double-check your optical testing equipment".  It turns out that Hubble wasn't the only space telescope to be sent into space with a fabrication defect.  Always, always, be sure you know what your equipment is doing!

"An Astigmatism Corrector for Visual Observers".  I have pretty severe astigmatism, which interferes with visual astronomy.  So, I invented this little gizmo that slips over my eyepieces and compensates for my astigmatic eyeball.  (I think that Televue may now be selling a commercial version of a similar device, but this home-made version is much cheaper!)

 "The Tahiti Telescope".  When my wife and I vacationed in Tahiti, I wanted to observe those celestial objects that aren't visible from our California home.  I built this little telescope to take along.

 "Creatures of the Night".  We astronomers aren't the only critters that are active in the dark!

Links to Recorded Lectures

These are fairly large "WMV" files, so be patient ...

• "Asteroid Phase Curves", presented at the 2010 Symposium of the Society for Astronomical Sciences.
• "The Evidence of Things Not Seen", presented to several astronomy clubs in 2009-2010, including the Small-Telescope Astronomical Research Conference, the Ventura County Astronomical Society, and the Orange County Astronomers.
•  "A Modern Incarnation of Tycho's Diurnal Parallax Method", presented at the 2011 Symposium of the Society for Astronomical Sciences.