I remember arguing long and hard with a friend at a campsite in deepest Bavaria about how many stars one can see in the night sky with the unaided human eye. The answer, according to this charming new book by James Kaler, is about 8000 – so my original estimate was about right all along and my friend’s, as I recall, was way over the mark.

The Little Book of Stars by James Kaler, a professor of astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is everything a popular-science book should be. It is thankfully short – about 180 small-format pages. It is a delight to read and is packed with accurate yet easy-to-digest scientific information. There are also none of the distracting thumbnail portraits of influential scientists that other popular-science books like to include to dilute the science.

Here the focus is purely and simply on the stars themselves: what they are made of, where they come from, how the live and die, how to study them, and how they affect our lives. Along the way we are also given a clear and lucid grounding in basic physics, including radioactivity, atomic structure, the gas laws, fundamental forces and so on.

Almost every page is beautifully written, with text that sometimes verges on the poetic. “New stars will someday form, carrying with them the ashes of the Sun – and perhaps the ashes of planets too,” concludes Kaler in the epilogue. Perhaps someday someone on a planet orbiting another star will tread on ground that is partially made of Earth. So it has gone and will continue to go for unimaginable time.”