Ramsden operates the Charlie Bates Solar Astronomy Project (www.charliebates.org), a nonprofit public outreach program sharing views of the Sun worldwide.
Solar astronomy, the study of the sun, is important with regard to plant growth because the sun's light is one of the most basic needs of flowering plants.
Eleven colorfully illustrated chapters give readers technical information on solar observation, from the structure of the Sun to professional solar astronomy. Readers learn how to observe the Sun safely and how to make a pinhole camera.
Its site, 5,704 feet above sea level in the Sierra Madre mountains, enjoys ideal conditions for both stellar and solar astronomy, and the arrival in 1908 of what was then the world's largest actively used telescope helped make it the source of a disproportionate number of the major astrophysical discoveries of the first half of the twentieth century.