![]() Hubble is the best known for its stunning photos, but Light from the Void proves that enhancing Hubble imagery with X-ray data from Chandra attains a whole new dimension of beauty. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory is (along with Hubble, Compton, and Spitzer) one of NASA’s Great Observatories, enormous space telescopes that have revolutionized astronomy in part by enabling study of stars and galaxies in wavelengths that don’t penetrate Earth’s atmosphere. Wilkes, with an introduction by Eileen Collins I would especially recommend this book to any kid (or adult) who enjoys writing hard science fiction, as inspiration for imagining alien life.īy Kimberly Arcand, Grant Tremblay, Megan Watzke, Martin C. When the authors run out of facts and data-and that doesn’t take long, this is astrobiology we’re talking about-it turns speculative, considering several different kinds of exoplanetary environments where life might arise, and the reasons why (or why not) intelligent life could result. The language is very accessible, always emphasizing the questions scientists are asking, how we’ve discovered answers, and how much we still don’t know. At the outset, Trefil and Summers’ book is an excellent introduction to the basic ideas of the study of astrobiology, explaining what experiments have shown us so far, what scientists are searching for, and the underlying physics and chemistry. At best, we can imagine what might be out there, either thought experiments firmly based in known physics or speculative fiction or some combination of the two. Is there life elsewhere in the universe? Is it made of the same stuff as us, on an Earthlike world, or does it have different chemistry on a different kind of planet? These are fascinating questions for any space fan, but they are also frustrating, because we have so little data. Imagined Life: A Speculative Scientific Journey among the Exoplanets in Search of Intelligent Aliens, Ice Creatures, and Supergravity Animals And suddenly I found myself a research mathematician!” That’s when I realized that they needed me, Colored or a woman or not. Instead they just handed me the next set of calculations-and then the next. For example, she was brought into the Flight Research Division of NACA to analyze data from one flight test, and was expected to be returned to the computing pool afterwards, but, she writes: “Somehow the engineers ‘forgot’ to return me. Her successes often came by being stubbornly competent and refusing to be discouraged until the people around her grudgingly recognized that they needed her skill. Her story is one of talent, hard work, patience, and determination. She sets her personal story in context with details about the cultural and political history of Jim Crow and the civil rights era, discussing how encounters with people who had control over her future often hinged on race. Katherine Johnson repeats her father Joshua Coleman’s words as a mantra throughout this excellent book. You’re no better than anybody else, but nobody’s better than you. Reaching for the Moon: The Autobiography of NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson One thing I especially appreciate about the captions is how Schilling usually identifies the facility used to take the photo and whether it’s in natural color or some other wavelength, a rarity in popular books about space. Each photo has a short but detailed and informative caption right next to it, making the book easy to navigate. There’s a timeline of discoveries associated with the constellation, reproductions of classical representations of the constellation, a handful of lovely photos of sky phenomena within them, and/or an artist’s representation of an exoplanet found within it. And did I mention how absolutely stuffed with factual information it is? For each constellation there’s a detailed map and a table with information about the number of stars it contains, bordering constellations, and when it’s visible to skywatchers, at what latitudes. The introductory information on the history of the constellations is thorough without being overlong. It can be dipped into at random, or read cover-to-cover. It is filled with facts and gorgeously designed. ![]() It’s not a kids’ book, but it’s written by a skilled science journalist and is highly accessible. This is exactly the kind of book I would have loved as a science-obsessed kid. Constellations: The Story of Space Told Through the 88 Known Star Patterns in the Night Skyīy Govert Schilling with original star maps by Wil Tirion
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