Trying to do my own bit of stargazing the other night, it irked me I could only really recognise The Plough, and Cassiopeia – but at least I could pronounce the latter, I thought. I might know more space science than I do the constellations, but that's not to mean I shouldn't know more of both. But would this, dropping within the week into my review inbox, help?

In a word, barely. It reminded me I should have seen Orion, at least – assuming, of course, given my neighbouring city's bad light pollution and clouds and such, I could have (nb I couldn't have – it's for the wintertime). But this is a book that is looking up, with one solid eye looking down at the ground. In line with the other books in this format from this publisher, we get a whole host of wonderful pictures – all frameable artworks in their own right – and a quick one or two sentences to caption each. But here the captions, which are the great majority of the text, spend almost exactly as much time telling us where the photos were taken – which isolated US National Park, which monument in Europe, which remote island in the Arctic – as it does telling us what we might be seeing were we to have been at the camerawoman's shoulder. And in giving us a new locale every spread, but with the pictures showing the same few naked-eye features (the Milky Way, Orion again, Mars, eclipses, etc), the information about the space aspect of the book becomes quite repetitive.

I do know what you can see when flat on your back looking up varies depending on how and when and where you are, but I did think this book would serve as a guide to how to spot the stars better – perhaps forming an overlapping mosaic of the entire firmament. As it is, this provides very little help for the budding star-spotter, and instead serves as a "how the pros did it" source book for wannabe night photographers. With that remit it would be well worth looking at, but that's not what I hoped for and expected here, especially with the subtitle concerned. Only a few basic charts at the rear suggest this might at all be useful in the field. This remains a photography book, and not an astronomy one.