Friday, December 19, 2014
Four "coffee table" books that will give you a Christmas journey to other planets
At a visit to the National Air and Space Museum in
Washington last Saturday, I picked up four coffee table books to try to get as
much picture material as possible on other planets that could contain life or
that are somewhat interesting, both in the Solar System, and extrasolar.
The best of these was DH’s Smithsonian “The Planets: The
Definitive Visual Guide to our Solar System” , edited by Ben Morgan, 2014, 256
pages.
The Mission to Mars chapter has only four color pages.
There are great diagrams of the inner structures of Jupiter
and Saturn (which have metallic hydrogen), as well as Uranus and Neptune, which
the book says may not be as gaseous as we had thought, and could have both “jello”
and diamond layers.
For Jupiter’s moons, there is a better picture of Ganymede
than Europa. For Titan (Saturn) there are some small NASA Cassini photos and
mock-ups, and a spectacular 2-page artist’s impression of a lake shore on the
surface, with Saturn in the sky and an orange twilight atmosphere. Enceladus
also has a spectacular panorama, as do Miranda (Uranus) and Triton (Neptune). Note the typo on p. 211, where the text reads "Titan" when "Triton" was intended. This is an easy mistake to make when writing (your brain makes a substitution) and hard to catch in copy-editing. I know this as a writer myself.
National Geographic offers “Mars: Inside the Curiosity
Mission” by Marc Kaufman, with a foreword by Elon Musk, 392 pages. This book gives the viewer the best possible
chance to take a vacation on Mars from an armchair on Christmas Day, after
dinner.
National Geographic also offers a “Kids’ Space Encyclopedia:
A Tour of the Solar System and Beyond” (2014), by David A. Aguilar, 192 pages .
Europa, Titan and Triton get good surface pictures. There are several exoplanets shown, including
one near a brown dwarf, and one in a star in a globular cluster, but nothing
that would come close to supporting life. It means a hot rocky planet recently
discovered in the Alpha Centauri system.
Kingfisher publishes “Universe: Journey into Deep Space” by
Dr. Mie Goldsmith, illustrated b Dr. Mark A. Garlick. There are spectacular
images of Titan, and Triton, and some more encouraging extra-solar planets,
including one with a coast looking Biblical, a waterworld with life, and a
couple of hot melting worlds (48 pages).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment