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Abstract
This article collects together some of the main ideas and experimental results on the twinkling of stars. Statistical methods are used to characterize the features of the scintillation and to investigate the ways in which these depend on the zenith angle of the star, the bandwidth of the light and various other parameters. Some new results are included which demonstrate the advantages of using photon counting methods in experiments on stellar scintillation. Since the twinkling of stars is a consequence of the turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere then measurements can be used to deduce some features of the structure of the turbulence. We discuss some of the experiments designed to do this and report the results.
