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Look into the hazy river of stars that flows across the night sky and you gaze into the center of our Galaxy. Over two hundred and fifty thousand trillion miles away, amid the bright star clouds of Sagittarius, lies the point about which the Milky Way’s 200 billion stars all revolve. Such distances, such numbers, such a view defy the imagination. Yet the incredible advances of modern science have built a compelling portrait of our cosmic habitat and armed with this hard-won knowledge, we can now confidently navigate our Galaxy’s 100,000-light-year span, exploring and explaining the wonders of the deep night sky.
With Stuart Clark’s lucid text and nearly 500 cutting-edge images, Galaxy investigates every aspect of the Milky Way – from its place in the Universe to its large-scale anatomy, from its history to its future. We approach the Milky Way from the very edge of the Universe, threading our way through massive conglomerations of galaxies gathered like grains of dust on a veil of cobwebs.
Out here we can survey the thriving diversity of galaxy types and galactic life. Homing in on our destination, we skirt fleets of satellite galaxies, orbiting our Galaxy like the Moon orbits the Earth, before plunging through the Milky Way’s spiral arms on a course that will ultimately lead us to its dark heart – a gravitational maelstrom of white dwarfs, neutron stars and hypergiants, all in the thrall of a supermassive black hole.
As we tour the Galaxy the rhythms of stellar life unfold before our eyes: we pass through dark clouds of dust and gas incubating clusters of embryonic stars, we discover spectacular emission nebulaeblazing in the fierce radiation of stellar newborns, we watch dying stars bloom and fade as planetary nebulae, or tear themselves apart as supernovae and we survey the planets and moons of our Solar System.
The fact that we can now classify and explain the exotic inhabitants of the deep night sky does nothing to diminish their wonder – if anything, it celebrates the extraordinary power of nature. As you will discover within these pages, our Galaxy – our home – is a beautiful place of awesome spectacle.
Knight-2000
Posted January 2, 2010
I have bought a number of space related books from National Geographic over the years, and all of them were great. This one is just another one that I would add to my collection. The sheer size of the book is surprising to say the least, but I really love the vast array of photos. For the price its a great book to own.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.As a physicist, I appreciate books like this that engage everybody. First of all, the pictures are fantastic, if not a little monotonous (can it be?!) after the first hundred pages. Second of all, the content is fairly well compiled. My non-scientist friends were reading and couldn't put it down. To me, that's success.
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Posted December 14, 2009
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Posted February 28, 2009
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Posted July 3, 2009
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Posted November 17, 2009
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Overview
Look into the hazy river of stars that flows across the night sky and you gaze into the center of our Galaxy. Over two hundred and fifty thousand trillion miles away, amid the bright star clouds of Sagittarius, lies the point about which the Milky Way’s 200 billion stars all revolve. Such distances, such numbers, such a view defy the imagination. Yet the incredible advances of modern science have built a compelling portrait of our cosmic habitat and armed with this hard-won knowledge, we can now confidently ...