It was a story about space - Apollo 13 - which first hooked Sheila Kanani and now decades
later after achieving a PhD in Saturn's magnetosphere and working as an outreach officer for
the Royal Astronomical Society she has made a career of weaving together the science and tales
of the stars. In The Starspotter's Guide her first book for adults Sheila pulls together the
rich tapestry of the night sky for the armchair stargazer sharing the stories that cultures
across the world have told about the stars for millennia - and how these have shaped our
exploration and understanding of the Earth from astrologers in ancient India using the stars
to calculate the length of the year to Polynesian explorers using them to navigate far beyond
their homes. And now as our knowledge expands about the endless expanse above us - such as
what the stars actually are - Sheila takes us on a journey through what you'd see if you could
jump on a spacecraft and explore these galaxies yourself. In this endlessly informative and
persuasively interesting miscellany of the night sky Dr Sheila Kanani takes us on a journey
through the cosmos and through the human experience of the stars throughout the ages that will
have you rushing outside and looking up searching for the curve of the Milky Way.
