Mar 28, 20223 min read

SPACE – FROM EARTH TO THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE

By Carole Stott, Robert Dinwiddie, David Hughes and Giles Sparrow

A wonderful companion for anyone having an interest in space and astronomy.

5 stars out of 5 stars

I recently reviewed three DK books. They were about Engineers, Science, and Music. Each is a visual spectacular in its subject. The present one, Space – from earth to the edge of the Universe, again does not disappoint. It stands tall among its peers.

The book is organized into six chapters. It starts with our home, which is entitled “Launching pad earth”. Here are described, both in words and in photos, the ingenious ways humans have built and launched all kinds of gadgets to observe the sky, study the earth, and other planets. They include telescopes on the ground, aboard space shuttles and space stations, as well as extremely sophisticated devices such as the Hubble Space Telescope, Mars Rovers, spaceships that landed humans on the moon, and spacecrafts which flied by distant planets, took photographs of their surfaces, turned around to take photos of the solar system planets, before sailing off onto interplanetary space. Future large telescopes in their design stages are also mentioned, such as the 30-meter optical telescope in Mauna Kea in the Big Island of Hawaii and the Allan radio telescope near San Francisco. Unfortunately, due to political and financial obstacles, neither have been completed to date.

Chapter 2 is about our neighboring worlds – sun, moon, Venus, mercury, and mars. Chapter 3 describes the asteroid belt, and the planets beyond the belt: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, as well as the comets beyond Neptune. Chapter 4 focuses on our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and nearby stars. Beyond the Milky Way, there lays a Universe of Galaxies, which is the subject of Chapter 5. Chapter 6 is an illustrative lesson of Cosmology, including the Big Bang, Dark Energy, Speculations of the several ways the Universe may end. The book concludes with a Reference Section which facilitates the quick look-up of facts and figures.

Throughout the chapters, there are spectacular photos which some of us have seen before, but also a ton of magnificent photos which are new for many of us. Several examples of the first category are: space shuttle launch; astronauts walking on the moon, rovers on Mars. For the seldom seen category, I can mention Space Station Mir over the Pacific taken by the Shuttle Discovery, View of Hurricane Rita (September 2005) captured by NASA’s Aqua satellite, The moon’s far side first taken by USSR’s lunar 3 craft, Venus’ surface mapped by the Magellan Spacecraft, Close up surface of the sun taken by the Swedish Solar Telescope in Spain, and the overview of the Pinwheel Galaxy obtained by combining 51 Hubble images with several Earth-based ones. While we all have seen the photo of earth (the pale blue dot) taken by Voyager I before it sailed off to interplanetary space, few of us have seen the Voyager I look-back photos of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The book was published in 2011. Thus, the space/astronomy discoveries of the last decade are missed. It did mention the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Its greatly improved infrared resolution and sensitivity will allow it to view objects too old, distant, and faint for the Hubble Space Telescope. JWST was launched on Christmas Day 2021 and is currently (March 2022) under testing and alignment. It is sad to see the photo of the 1000’ Arecibo antenna, which was the largest radio telescope when the book was published. It is no longer in operation due to the collapse of the feed platform in December 2020.

In conclusion, “Space – from earth to the edge of the Universe”, is a wonderful companion for anyone having an interest in space and astronomy.

(The source of the following photos are from the book under review.)