Spacecam: Photographing the Final Frontier - from Apollo to Hubble

Culled from throughout the fifty year history of the space program, these images present stunning scenes from this planet and several others, all the while revealing the breathtaking beauty and mystery of outer space.

With captions serving as text, this volume gathers 300 images, generally one per page, acquired from spacecraft from Apollo to the present. Hope notes the spectrum collected by the imaging instrument, be it radio, visible light, or ultraviolet, and then describes the scene. The book includes some of NASA's most famous photographs, but Hope is not stuck in a greatest-hits groove. He pulls pictures containing something intrinsically dramatic, either a wide-frame mosaic of an outer planet (e.g., Saturn) or zoom-magnification of the results of earthly catastrophe, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Others represent intrinsic scientific interest, such as clues to water collected by NASA's Martian flotilla, or the creation or destruction of stars as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Perhaps browsers will linger longest over the images of Earth's environment, and here Hope has chosen well: volcanoes, icebergs, storms, and pollution display the natural and man-made activity impressively or disturbingly visible from space. An economical option for libraries' space-age photography requirement. Gilbert Taylor
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