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Galaxy: Exploring the Milky Way
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
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
1 person is currently reading
54 people want to read
About the author
Stuart Clark
20 books76 followersJournalist, award-winning author and broadcaster, Stuart Clark is a brilliant storyteller. Fiction or non-fiction, his work is written with conviction and with passion. In recent years, he has devoted his career to presenting the complex and dynamic world of astronomy to the general public.
His latest work is the pioneering trilogy The Sky's Dark Labyrinth. In the way that CJ Sansom's hugely successful Shardlake series marries crime writing with popular history, so The Sky's Dark Labyrinth trilogy blends gripping, original historical fiction with popular science.
Stuart holds a first-class honours degree and a phd in astrophysics. A Visiting Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, he is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a former Vice Chair of the Association of British Science Writers. But it was his first work of narrative nonfiction, The Sun Kings, that established him as a popular science writer par excellence. Without fail the reviews, ranging from Nature to Bookslut.com, remarked on his exceptional storytelling ability and sheer verve of his writing. It was shortlisted by the Royal Society for their 2008 general science book prize, it won Italy's 2009 Montselice Prize for best scientific translation, and the Association of American Publishers 2007 Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for Excellence in the Cosmology and Astronomy category.
Stuart is a regular contributor to national and international radio and television programmes and dvd productions. He frequently lectures throughout the UK and, increasingly, throughout the world.
His latest work is the pioneering trilogy The Sky's Dark Labyrinth. In the way that CJ Sansom's hugely successful Shardlake series marries crime writing with popular history, so The Sky's Dark Labyrinth trilogy blends gripping, original historical fiction with popular science.
Stuart holds a first-class honours degree and a phd in astrophysics. A Visiting Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, he is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a former Vice Chair of the Association of British Science Writers. But it was his first work of narrative nonfiction, The Sun Kings, that established him as a popular science writer par excellence. Without fail the reviews, ranging from Nature to Bookslut.com, remarked on his exceptional storytelling ability and sheer verve of his writing. It was shortlisted by the Royal Society for their 2008 general science book prize, it won Italy's 2009 Montselice Prize for best scientific translation, and the Association of American Publishers 2007 Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for Excellence in the Cosmology and Astronomy category.
Stuart is a regular contributor to national and international radio and television programmes and dvd productions. He frequently lectures throughout the UK and, increasingly, throughout the world.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 25, 2015
An astonishingly beautiful look into the things that are all around us and yet so far away: nebulae, stars, supernovas, planets, galaxies. Books like these really put us on perspective, and I think this one in particular should mandatory reading for whenever you feel a little too self-involved or woe-is-me. The photographs are full-page, and the book itself is massive (in terms of height and width) and spellbinding. Highly recommended for people of all ages.
May 19, 2015
An amazing book, filled both with interesting and informative data as well as page after page of AMAZING photography, Galaxy is a book I cannot recommend enough to anyone with even a passing interest in astronomy and cosmology. Appropriate for children as well as adults, I really enjoy picking this one up to flip through the pages as much as I do to settle in and read about our galaxy, solar system, and the universe.
June 16, 2022
This is a wonderful, gorgeous book.
Made from superb quality paper, with some of the most beautiful images imaginable - and beyond imagining - it is superbly laid out, with superlative graphic design, and combines succinct and relevant data quickly assimilable with interesting discussion about all the key objects of the Solar System and the types and members of the galactic local group, cluster and supercluster, and beyond.
Images of galactic collisions and the residual nebulae from supernovae are of the most sublime in nature and the history of human art and culture. That such beauty disguises unimaginably vast and violent objects and processes is almost impossible to comprehend, yet the order of the elliptical rotations of the planets about the Sun and the dance of the galaxies in an expanding universe allows us to accommodate some grasp of meaning from the otherwise utterly bewildering numbers and scale of it all.
I love this book. It's the perfect coffee table book. It's not just for reading cover-to-cover, but for dipping into, browsing through, musing over, turning to when you have a burning question pop into your mind. Like 'How big is Eris?' 'How far away is Neptune?' 'How many stars are in the Andromeda galaxy?' 'What is a white dwarf, a neutron star...?' And: 'Why can't this book update itself of all relevant recent findings?' Well, maybe a step too far.
It is interesting that the first three decades of the Twentieth Century were instrumental in our moving towards a model of how the universe and its galaxies were made, developed, came to be observed and measured, and envisaged into the future. Following Einstein's theory of General Relativity of 1915, which incorporated gravity into a model of the larger cosmos, and incorporated the concepts of gravitational time dilation, gravitational lensing and red shift - which are central to astronomical measurements of distant bodies - Lemaître proposed in 1927 the concept of the Big Bang (not coined till later by Fred Hoyle, in opposition to it) in his theory of an expanding universe of cosmic inflation, a logical extension of Einstein's theory, and so logically back to an initial conception point. Since then, further proofs brought about by more sophisticated telescopy, including Hubble's work in recording and classifying galaxies, ratified Lemaître's concepts, particularly the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation promulgated by Gamow and team and accidentally detected by radio astronomers Penzias and Wilson in 1965, a year before Lemaître's death.
All this leads to the CMBR Map, or WMAP, from NASA's 2003 image to the more detailed 2013 ESA Planck image which provides us with the map of our universe. The ideas entailed within this image are staggering and entirely counter-intuitive. The idea of a Big Bang is equally counter-intuitive. How can there be any such thing as a 'super-force' in the first 1/billionth of a second of the moment of creation, within an infinitely small and dense singularity smaller than an atom, which contained the undifferentiated forces of gravity, electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces, if they govern the laws of physics since the Big Bang? Why did gravity separate first from this super-force and so free the others - when gravity is the force which binds all else together? Why has the old concept of 'ether' been reintroduced into astronomical physics, as 'dark matter', as an 'all-pervading medium that fills space' (p.11)? Isn't it rather simplistic to assume that another invisible force, 'dark energy', is the opposing force that Einstein promulgated as being equal and opposite to gravity to prevent rotational objects from falling into the centre (as the planets around our Sun)? This force/energy has to be just that little bit more powerful than gravity in order to account for cosmic inflation, and be evenly distributed. Could this not be merely the momentum of the initial explosion, rather than part of the dark forces which are thought to make up 99.5% of the universe? No, because of those rotating planets.
So many questions about these concepts are wrapped up in just one image. This book is full of hundreds of them, and none are more beautiful than those of our 8 planets, their moons, and the other larger bodies in our Solar System. From the scale of WMAP to that of galactic superclusters, we can now come down to images and ideas we can at least sanely grasp. Pluto will always be the ninth planet for me, because I grew up with it so for most of my life. I do not resent Eris for its 2005 discovery toppling even Pluto's claim to being the largest planetesimal (or dwarf planet, as the 2006 re-classification termed it); Pluto was still technically special (p.243). For me, it will always be special, if only for its goofy name.
Names are not irrelevant when scanning the universe, its galaxies, our supercluster, cluster, local group and Solar System. It is noticeable that all of the 27 moons of Uranus (p.235) are named after largely Shakespearean and a few Pope characters, many of them from The Tempest [1611]; that all of the planets are named after the Roman nomenclature for their Gods (pp.154-5); that many of the galaxy superclusters or constellations are named after Greek mythological entities (pp.17-21). That our Sun is located within the Milky Way in the Orion Spur of the Sagittarius Arm (p.50). That the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way is called Sagittarius A*, that our galaxy is part of the constellation Sagittarius. All of this is as exotic as the associated imagery.
Now (2022), subsequent to this book's publication (2008), since the launch in 2013 of ESA's Gaia Telescope to map the Milky Way, we have a phenomenal four-dimensional map of 100-200 billion stars (or 400bn, whatever the current estimate) which can be projected forwards and backwards. Gaia used parallax scanning to record each star on average 70 times, in motion, and this has led to the observation that some of the stars in our galaxy rotate counter to the clockwise motion of the galaxy. Their haphazard paths in a huge swathe of gas that wraps round the galaxy indicate some enormous event in the past. It is now believed that this is due to two big 'collisions' with other, smaller galaxies, the earliest being Gaia Enceladus, a dwarf galaxy, which merged into the Milky Way, causing a renewed period of star making with its extra fuel; and then, about 6 billion years ago, Sagittarius Dwarf, another dwarf galaxy in our local group. Projecting forwards, Andromeda will collide with the Milky Way in 4.5 billion years - about the life left remaining to our own Sun - as it heads towards us at 400,000 km/h.
I turned to this book again when wanting clarification while watching a series on the Universe. Nearly half of this book - and that series - is devoted to the Solar System and the planets and their moons, as well as the large Asteroid Belt and Kuiper Belt objects. Its presentation of basic stats in deliciously crisp graphics allowed me to make more sense of the contrasts within our Solar System between the inner rocky and outer gas and ice giant planets. It too highlights Europa and Titan, Jupiter's 4th largest moon and Saturn's largest, respectively, as possible harbours of possible life, along with the small frozen moon of Saturn, Enceladus. It is lit up with images of planets - that image of Io against Jupiter (p.207) is awesome - no less spectacular and gorgeous as those of the spiral galaxies which, under composites of the Hubble optical (1990-), Chandra X-ray (1999-), and Spitzer Infra-red (2003-20) space telescopes, are just breath-taking. As are those of the Horsehead Nebula (p.83), and the Pillars of the Eagle Nebula (pp.86-7), and The Mountains Of Creation (p.84). Tell me you are not mesmerised by such images.
My interest in the galaxy, the universe, the Solar System, is only passing, after long periods, cyclically. But it is always one of fascination. Such imagery, such scale, such baffling complexity is as much art as science for me. I love this book.
And at only £25, it is a gift.
While there are a few obvious errors in this book - it starts with the formal designation names of the asteroids, but drops them on the next page (p.198); Saturn is 1.4 billion km from the Sun, not million (p.214); there is an error in the distance dimension of panel 1 on Saturn's moons (p.219); Uranus's moon is Perdita (The Winter's Tale), not Perdida (p.235); and the aphelion of comet Borrelly is dubious, considering the perihelion is usually the nearer figure (p.245) - this work is so beautifully presented it is almost edible. And perhaps for the older the font should be larger - since there's plenty of blank space!
More than anything, this lovely, informative, beautifully designed book evokes wonder. It spawned a fortnight of intensive personal research into its subjects, from galaxy superclusters (Laniakea, what a wonderful entity!), through innumerable star types (I shall have to revise these) and black holes (ours, Sagittarius A*) to the planets (gorgeous), moons (myriads) and other solar system objects out to 200,000 AU (30 trillion, or 30 million million km). Because of the scale of the numbers involved, you need to spend a month taking it all in. Anything less is remiss.
Made from superb quality paper, with some of the most beautiful images imaginable - and beyond imagining - it is superbly laid out, with superlative graphic design, and combines succinct and relevant data quickly assimilable with interesting discussion about all the key objects of the Solar System and the types and members of the galactic local group, cluster and supercluster, and beyond.
Images of galactic collisions and the residual nebulae from supernovae are of the most sublime in nature and the history of human art and culture. That such beauty disguises unimaginably vast and violent objects and processes is almost impossible to comprehend, yet the order of the elliptical rotations of the planets about the Sun and the dance of the galaxies in an expanding universe allows us to accommodate some grasp of meaning from the otherwise utterly bewildering numbers and scale of it all.
I love this book. It's the perfect coffee table book. It's not just for reading cover-to-cover, but for dipping into, browsing through, musing over, turning to when you have a burning question pop into your mind. Like 'How big is Eris?' 'How far away is Neptune?' 'How many stars are in the Andromeda galaxy?' 'What is a white dwarf, a neutron star...?' And: 'Why can't this book update itself of all relevant recent findings?' Well, maybe a step too far.
It is interesting that the first three decades of the Twentieth Century were instrumental in our moving towards a model of how the universe and its galaxies were made, developed, came to be observed and measured, and envisaged into the future. Following Einstein's theory of General Relativity of 1915, which incorporated gravity into a model of the larger cosmos, and incorporated the concepts of gravitational time dilation, gravitational lensing and red shift - which are central to astronomical measurements of distant bodies - Lemaître proposed in 1927 the concept of the Big Bang (not coined till later by Fred Hoyle, in opposition to it) in his theory of an expanding universe of cosmic inflation, a logical extension of Einstein's theory, and so logically back to an initial conception point. Since then, further proofs brought about by more sophisticated telescopy, including Hubble's work in recording and classifying galaxies, ratified Lemaître's concepts, particularly the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation promulgated by Gamow and team and accidentally detected by radio astronomers Penzias and Wilson in 1965, a year before Lemaître's death.
All this leads to the CMBR Map, or WMAP, from NASA's 2003 image to the more detailed 2013 ESA Planck image which provides us with the map of our universe. The ideas entailed within this image are staggering and entirely counter-intuitive. The idea of a Big Bang is equally counter-intuitive. How can there be any such thing as a 'super-force' in the first 1/billionth of a second of the moment of creation, within an infinitely small and dense singularity smaller than an atom, which contained the undifferentiated forces of gravity, electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces, if they govern the laws of physics since the Big Bang? Why did gravity separate first from this super-force and so free the others - when gravity is the force which binds all else together? Why has the old concept of 'ether' been reintroduced into astronomical physics, as 'dark matter', as an 'all-pervading medium that fills space' (p.11)? Isn't it rather simplistic to assume that another invisible force, 'dark energy', is the opposing force that Einstein promulgated as being equal and opposite to gravity to prevent rotational objects from falling into the centre (as the planets around our Sun)? This force/energy has to be just that little bit more powerful than gravity in order to account for cosmic inflation, and be evenly distributed. Could this not be merely the momentum of the initial explosion, rather than part of the dark forces which are thought to make up 99.5% of the universe? No, because of those rotating planets.
So many questions about these concepts are wrapped up in just one image. This book is full of hundreds of them, and none are more beautiful than those of our 8 planets, their moons, and the other larger bodies in our Solar System. From the scale of WMAP to that of galactic superclusters, we can now come down to images and ideas we can at least sanely grasp. Pluto will always be the ninth planet for me, because I grew up with it so for most of my life. I do not resent Eris for its 2005 discovery toppling even Pluto's claim to being the largest planetesimal (or dwarf planet, as the 2006 re-classification termed it); Pluto was still technically special (p.243). For me, it will always be special, if only for its goofy name.
Names are not irrelevant when scanning the universe, its galaxies, our supercluster, cluster, local group and Solar System. It is noticeable that all of the 27 moons of Uranus (p.235) are named after largely Shakespearean and a few Pope characters, many of them from The Tempest [1611]; that all of the planets are named after the Roman nomenclature for their Gods (pp.154-5); that many of the galaxy superclusters or constellations are named after Greek mythological entities (pp.17-21). That our Sun is located within the Milky Way in the Orion Spur of the Sagittarius Arm (p.50). That the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way is called Sagittarius A*, that our galaxy is part of the constellation Sagittarius. All of this is as exotic as the associated imagery.
Now (2022), subsequent to this book's publication (2008), since the launch in 2013 of ESA's Gaia Telescope to map the Milky Way, we have a phenomenal four-dimensional map of 100-200 billion stars (or 400bn, whatever the current estimate) which can be projected forwards and backwards. Gaia used parallax scanning to record each star on average 70 times, in motion, and this has led to the observation that some of the stars in our galaxy rotate counter to the clockwise motion of the galaxy. Their haphazard paths in a huge swathe of gas that wraps round the galaxy indicate some enormous event in the past. It is now believed that this is due to two big 'collisions' with other, smaller galaxies, the earliest being Gaia Enceladus, a dwarf galaxy, which merged into the Milky Way, causing a renewed period of star making with its extra fuel; and then, about 6 billion years ago, Sagittarius Dwarf, another dwarf galaxy in our local group. Projecting forwards, Andromeda will collide with the Milky Way in 4.5 billion years - about the life left remaining to our own Sun - as it heads towards us at 400,000 km/h.
I turned to this book again when wanting clarification while watching a series on the Universe. Nearly half of this book - and that series - is devoted to the Solar System and the planets and their moons, as well as the large Asteroid Belt and Kuiper Belt objects. Its presentation of basic stats in deliciously crisp graphics allowed me to make more sense of the contrasts within our Solar System between the inner rocky and outer gas and ice giant planets. It too highlights Europa and Titan, Jupiter's 4th largest moon and Saturn's largest, respectively, as possible harbours of possible life, along with the small frozen moon of Saturn, Enceladus. It is lit up with images of planets - that image of Io against Jupiter (p.207) is awesome - no less spectacular and gorgeous as those of the spiral galaxies which, under composites of the Hubble optical (1990-), Chandra X-ray (1999-), and Spitzer Infra-red (2003-20) space telescopes, are just breath-taking. As are those of the Horsehead Nebula (p.83), and the Pillars of the Eagle Nebula (pp.86-7), and The Mountains Of Creation (p.84). Tell me you are not mesmerised by such images.
My interest in the galaxy, the universe, the Solar System, is only passing, after long periods, cyclically. But it is always one of fascination. Such imagery, such scale, such baffling complexity is as much art as science for me. I love this book.
And at only £25, it is a gift.
While there are a few obvious errors in this book - it starts with the formal designation names of the asteroids, but drops them on the next page (p.198); Saturn is 1.4 billion km from the Sun, not million (p.214); there is an error in the distance dimension of panel 1 on Saturn's moons (p.219); Uranus's moon is Perdita (The Winter's Tale), not Perdida (p.235); and the aphelion of comet Borrelly is dubious, considering the perihelion is usually the nearer figure (p.245) - this work is so beautifully presented it is almost edible. And perhaps for the older the font should be larger - since there's plenty of blank space!
More than anything, this lovely, informative, beautifully designed book evokes wonder. It spawned a fortnight of intensive personal research into its subjects, from galaxy superclusters (Laniakea, what a wonderful entity!), through innumerable star types (I shall have to revise these) and black holes (ours, Sagittarius A*) to the planets (gorgeous), moons (myriads) and other solar system objects out to 200,000 AU (30 trillion, or 30 million million km). Because of the scale of the numbers involved, you need to spend a month taking it all in. Anything less is remiss.
December 15, 2020
Phenomenal compilation. Breathtaking pictures in large enough size to really appreciate the details available in hubble and other telescope pictures. The story for each photograph is succinct and pointed. It may take a deeper dive into astronomy book to get a hang of the of the insights but for a coffee table book, its one of the best books on the subject.
Currently reading
January 8, 2010What a bitter irony that no image is currently available for this book. This book has some words, most of which I haven't read yet, but more importantly it is a very large book with very large pictures of space on every page (I'm pretty sure the reason I didn't read it cover-to-cover the moment I got it is because it's too big to be conducive to bedtime reading). It's page after page of amazing images. I highly recommend for coffee tables everywhere, particularly where people who are perhaps not aware of how utterly bitchin' space is can make themselves aware.
April 20, 2010
I learned that the universe is freaking huge.
This is a high quality coffee table book with incredible images of far-reaching galaxies. The author's text gave jaw-dropping insight into the formation of stars and other celestial bodies. There were many times when I would say "Holy crap..." out loud as I read the book.
There is one picture in particular that spans both pages of the book. It is an image of space that is 130 light years across.
The universe is freaking huge.
This is a high quality coffee table book with incredible images of far-reaching galaxies. The author's text gave jaw-dropping insight into the formation of stars and other celestial bodies. There were many times when I would say "Holy crap..." out loud as I read the book.
There is one picture in particular that spans both pages of the book. It is an image of space that is 130 light years across.
The universe is freaking huge.
July 28, 2015
I had this as a birthday present in March 2009. The information inside is brilliant and the images are spectacular. Probably not suitable for bedtime reading (it's far too large!) but perfect for browsing at a coffee table or desk.
January 30, 2011
The pictures were incredible !!!
I found it absolutely fascinating to see the photos, and read about our universe etc.
Way cool.
I found it absolutely fascinating to see the photos, and read about our universe etc.
Way cool.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews