Turn Right at Orion: Travels Through the Cosmos

by Mitchell Begelman

This ingenious book is the account of an epic astronomical journey, a tale told by an early-twenty-first-century human sailor among the stars. The account is discovered, as an alien "translator's note" reveals, sixty million years in earth's future -- the product of one man's amazing, revelatory, and occasionally perilous space odyssey. Astrophysicist Mitchell Begelman takes the reader to far-distant shores, across a vast ocean of time, in a narrative that zips along at just below light speed. We travel to the center of the Milky Way, witness the births and deaths of stars, almost perish in the crushing forces at the perimeter of a black hole -- and all the while Begelman explains in clear and vibrant prose the way things work in the cosmos. A powerful imaginative work that is thoroughly grounded both in history and in the latest in astrophysical thinking and observation, Turn Right at Orion is serious science that reads like fiction.

Genres: Science, Astronomy, Space, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Don Skotch Vail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good fun if you are a astronomy nerd. It's written like science fiction, but with almost no feeling in it. The narrator just jumps around the universe in his spaceship describing what he finds.

Scientifically accurate, but we never learn how the narrator feels to be alone for so many years while everyone that he ever knew died 1000's of years before. A liitle humanity would have made this read a lot more fun.

[Geoffrey Forden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best astronomy book I have ever read! It tours all the exciting astronomical phenomena and explains the physics of what is going on in a straight forward and non-mathematical way. The conceit of an lone astronomer flying around the galaxy works perfectly

Think of it like Galileo’s “stary messenger.” It’s not a novel, it’s a dialogue for describing the natural world

[Robert Swanson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I probably should give it a four-star rating, given the influence this book has had on amateur astronomers. Chock full of information provided through a sci-fi travelogue narrative.

But, I'm not a fan of this presentation (in any field). There isn't much of a plot so it isn't a story. There are better ways to present this matieral via myths and stories than this fashion. This travelogue narrative takes too long to provide the information.

I did enjoy the Orion/Trapizeum sections. The narrative is a bit dated, but that isn't an issue. Copyright 2000.

This book could be in a web-based meta-data format where facts and the individual constellations are hyper-linked to current knowledge bases. Wow, what a rabbit-hole this would send me down.

[Elena]

NOT for the novice. I know basic physics, and a little about astrophysics, and while this was thorough and ostensibly well explained, and did yield some flashes of insight here and there, it is way too much information for the first-time armchair astronomer, or it was for me anyways. Over my head, though someday I hope to understand it better.