When I was a kid my favorite book was National Geographic’s Our Universe. It’s an amazing coffee table book with information and images, real, imagined and projected, of the solar system and the galaxy. I read most of it and looked at the pictures hundreds of times. Even before my son was born, I ordered his copy.
Last week I saw a book review for Vistas of Many Worlds: A Journey Through Space and Time by Erik Anderson published by the Ashland Astronomy Studio on Universe Today. Ordered it immediately, got it yesterday. Love it.
Vistas of Many Worlds
This is a coffee-table-book size book that features digital images of the night sky as they would look from other vantage points in the galaxy or from millions of years in the past or future. Each image is accompanied by a narrative explaining what it shows. The images are compelling and the text is easy to read and understand.
My son is only 3, but we have been working a page or two into the bed time reading repertoire, and he enjoys it. The book explains a lot about how the night sky has changed form the past and how it will change in the future.
The image above is a good example of the kind of image/text in this book. I love this. It shows the Big Dipper as it appears in the sky today, as well as what it looked like 150,000 years in the past and what it will look like 150,000 years into the future. The image on the right shows the stars represented in the Big Dipper and how they move around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, thus explaining the shifting arrangement of the constellation.
We haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I really like the book and love that my son enjoys looking at pictures of the stars and hearing me read about them.
The book
The book is printed on nice gloss paper with a high quality hard cover. The pictures are photo quality. Yet the price of the book is a very reasonable $30. Check it out, You can buy it from Amazon.com or direct from Ashland Astronomy Studio.
-Mike
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