The Cambridge Guide to the Solar System

by Kenneth R. Lang

Richly illustrated with full-color images, this book is a comprehensive, up-to-date description of the planets, their moons, and recent exoplanet discoveries. This second edition of a now classic reference is brought up to date with fascinating new discoveries from 12 recent Solar System missions. Examples include water on the Moon, volcanism on Mercury's previously unseen half, vast buried glaciers on Mars, geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus, lakes of hydrocarbons on Titan, encounter with asteroid Itokawa, and sample return from comet Wild 2. The book is further enhanced by hundreds of striking new images of the planets and moons. Written at an introductory level appropriate for undergraduate and high-school students, it provides fresh insights that appeal to anyone with an interest in planetary science. A website hosted by the author contains all the images in the book with an overview of their importance. A link to this can be found at www.cambridge.org/solarsystem.

Genres: Astronomy, Reference, Science, Nonfiction, Space

502 pages, Hardcover

First published October 6, 2003

Reviews

[Aprilleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book, with enough information jammed inside it’s substantial volume to induce headaches if you try to read through it like a standard nonfiction book. It’s well organized, with sections for each of the major planets (sorry Pluto, but if it makes you feel better Uranus and Neptune had to share a section), as well as coverage of the Moon, comets, asteroids and meteors, as well as the solar system in general and impact events. There’s no coverage of the Sun, which may seem odd until you realize there’s a separate volume just for our central star (The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Sun). Within each chapter, the material is broken up into 4-10 sections, and the beginning of each chapter has a couple pages of one-sentence summaries of the material to be covered. Within the limitations of the coverage (you’d need the companion volume about the Sun) this would make a decent textbook for solar system astronomy (or a great companion to a more traditional textbook).

The coverage is pretty impressive, although densely written. He doesn’t shy away from the mathematical underpinnings the way many authors of astronomy books tend to do, but for the most part the math is not the main focus. I think you could skim over those sections and not lose much, but I’m still pleased that it was included (brings back memories of taking astronomy in college). The illustrations are plentiful, but not to the point of overwhelming the text or displacing it. In many cases, the illustrations are critical to understanding the subject being covered on that page.

Among the topics that I found interesting were a rather long section on Earth’s atmosphere and global warming (a more extensive treatment than I would have expected in an astronomy book), some information about the Moon that I hadn’t known already, a lot more detail about the Galilean Moons than I’ve ever seen before, and an interesting tidbit about the Tunguska explosion that reminded me of a fiction book I read not that long ago that took some liberties with the explanation of that phenomenon.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice reference, well organized and thorough. This is interesting to browse and handy when some topic comes up - we were watching a Science Channel documentary that mentioned the Kuiper Belt, wanted to know more detail than the show provided, so out came this book and there it was. Plenty of good illustrations, a good index, and appendices listing further reading and useful Web sites. This will be helpful for explaining things to our grandkids when they get a couple of years older, too.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great refernce for all the planets and other features of our solar system.Tonnes of inforamtion for anybody interested in the planets and our solar system. There is quite a lot of inforamtion but for those who are really interested and looking for an up to date book about the planets to satify their hunger for knowledge on the solar system then I reccomend this book for you.