Geoff Andersen is a USAF Academy physicist and he has written a book on the Telescope
The Telescope
by Geoff Andersen
Princeton University Press 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12979-2
It is an interesting little book, as promised it only has one equation, and it is a useful one, with the rest of the semi-technical material relegated to appendices.
As such, the book is aimed at general audiences, and would be well suited to an interested amateur, enthusiastic teenager or university educated layperson wanting to learn some basics about optical telescopes.
The book focuses on optical telescopes, starting from a historical perspective, and rapidly working through to modern telescopes. The coverage is pretty good, covering the basic technology, modern detectors, and observatories, with a brief foray into space, focusing on the Hubble Space Telescope.
I found the chapter on surveillance particularly interesting, including a very clear description of the difference between "looking up" and "looking down" when it comes to atmospheric turbulence.
I would have appreciated a couple of more chapters - there is no mention of radio, microwave or x-ray telescopes, although the different approaches there would have made for very interesting comparisons - phase coherent imaging in radio, different detector strategy in microwaves and the far-infrared, and glancing incidence optics in the x-rays. I also felt there could have been more discussion of the infra-red, and the gamma-ray discussion focuses on imaging of ultra-high energy gamma ray induced air showers, whereas I'd have liked to see a discussion of coded mask apertures.
Maybe in the next edition?
There were a couple of niggling points: LIGO is impressive as a scientific observatory, but I'm pretty sure the VLBI is "larger" as a distributed observatory.
The discussion of the original Hubble aberration debacle implies that the root cause is still not well understood, whereas my sense is that the Allen Commission report tracked the sequence of events and errors at Perkin-Elmer rather comprehensively (large PDF)
"The Telescope" is not a comprehensive history, or a technical compendium, but it is a very nice, concise non-technical introduction to the subject and a good read.
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Damn, coded-aperture imaging is interesting. Thank you for including the link in your review. A glance at the list of instruments shows that most are "flown" instruments. What is the size of a coded-aperture scope? Judging from the detector areas, they must be around 20 to 30 cm in lateral dimension.
The BAT on the Swift satellite is 5200 square centimeters, so a bit bigger than that.
That is effective area - if you look at the picture down the page on the web page of the actual aperture mask, the total area is 2.7 square meters - like a king size bed.
An informative book. I purchased it under the name "Eye on the Sky" some months ago. I was disappointed to learn that the military withheld adaptive optics technology from astronomers for a decade, imagine how much faster the science would have progressed if it had not been. Then again, they've built some pretty awesome machines such as the 3.6m (AEOS) which can track satellites at 18 degrees/second, and he calculates that it's not too unlikely the military have a surveillance telescope on the order of 5m in orbit.
I would like to see a book dedicated more towards the great observatories and the ones that are now being built, such as the Keck telescopes, the LBT, the VLT, and the ELT on the horizon. A subject we'll definitely see more written about in the coming years.