Here's a pretty gutsy move: an astronomy professor, knowing that there are millions and millions of stars out there waiting to be explored, proceeds to identify and then make his case for why a mere 100 of them should be ranked as the greatest. 

And Professor James B. Kaler makes a pretty persuasive case in his tour of the skies. Or, as Kaler himself says,  "With expert critics extolling their 100 favorite movies, songs, radish recipes, I thought, why not stars?"

Starting with Acrux (the Southern Cross) and proceeding through his list to ZZ Ceti, Kaler tells us a great deal about the stars, their properties, age, location and more. Before he gets into his list, he gives us a relatively quick astronomy lesson, starting with the most basic definition of a star: "The self-luminous condensates of the fragmented dusty gases that fill interstellar space." 

That sounds pretty simple. From there, Kaler talks about fusion. the history of astronomy, constellations as human creations, the nearly incomprehensible distances of even the nearest star (The Sun is 150 million kilometers away, or one Astronomical Unit); the nearest true star, Alpha Centauri, is 270,000 AU away. This is not a weekend get-away.)

He also explores the question of magnitude, or brightness, a concept established in the second century BC by the Greek Hipparchus. Magnitude ratings are related to each other, so a first-magnitude star is 100 times brighter than a sixth magnitude star. Luminosity and color are addressed, as are the kinds of stars (temperature and chemical variations are factors.)

For those of you who bailed out of astronomy class because parsnips and parsecs were starting to sound too much alike, this book makes the basic concepts easy, before getting into the breakdown of the 100 stars Kaler has chosen. 

This book is beautifully illustrated and presented, with most stars shown in color photos on the left page, facing the one-page text explaining what we know about the star, and the reason for its inclusion in this list. Clearly, Kaler is in love with his subject, and writes about the stars almost as if they were living beings.

For example: Best of all, Acrux leads our vision to one of the most glorious regions of the Milky Way, the great band of starlight formed by the disk of our Galaxy, in which the Sun is embedded."

Some of these stars are well known, such as No.85, as Kaler writes: "As light from Sirius enters Earth's atmosphere, it begins to bend, then plunges into a roller coaster of a refractive ride through blowing cells of warm and cold air that break it into diamonds' colors just before it enters the wondering eye of a girl who at that moment knows that she will be an astronomer. All stars twinkle, but none like Sirius, the sky's brighest star, one whose white light plays a rainbow." 

Betelgeuse is another, a huge star that was the first to have its surfaced imaged by the Hubble telescope in 1996, Kaler says. And it's a bit odd, with no clear "edge" to it, a star destined to collapse since its hydrogen supply has run out. The collapse will lead the star to explode, leaving a much smaller star behind. But, as Kaler points out, don't stay up watching for this event, since it's not likely to happen for about a million years. 

Antares is another supergiant, like Betelgeuse, also destined for destruction as it moves from helium-burning to carbon-burning and then the development of an iron core that will collapse and explode, creating a supernova that no one will miss. 

So he goes through his list, teaching astronomy and not simply listing the known facts about any given star. 

This is a gem for people who look to the heavens and wonder about what they see.

 Pam Robinson  is a news editor for the Los Angeles Times-Washinton Post News Service and co-founder of ACES.