Stars in Your Hand: A Guide to 3D Printing the Cosmos

An illustrated guide to exploring the Universe in three dimensions.

Astronomers have made remarkable discoveries about our Universe, despite their reliance on the flat projection, or 2D view, the sky has offered them. But now, drawing on the vast stores of data available from telescopes and observatories on the ground and in space, astronomers are using 3D technology to go beyond a flattened view of the cosmos. In Stars in Your Hand, Kimberly Arcand and Megan Watzke offer an illustrated guide to exploring the Universe in three dimensions, with easy-to-follow instructions for creating models of stars and constellations using a 3D printer and 3D computer imaging.
 
Stars in Your Hand and 3D technology make learning about space an adventure. Intrigued by the stunning images from high-powered telescopes? Using this book, you can fly virtually through a 3D spacescape and hold models of cosmic objects in your hand. Arcand and Watzke outline advances in 3D technology, describe some amazing recent discoveries in astronomy, reacquaint us with the night sky, and provide brief biographies of the telescopes, probes, and rovers that are bringing us so much data. They then offer images and instructions for printing and visualizing stars, nebulae, supernovae, galaxies, and even black holes in 3D. The 3D Universe is a marvel, and Stars in Your Hand serves as a unique and thrilling portal to discovery. 

Kimberly Arcand is Visualization Scientist and Emerging Technology Lead at the Chandra X-ray Center, the headquarters for a NASA space-based telescope at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
 
Megan Watzke is the press officer for the Chandra X-ray Observatory, a NASA space-based telescope that is the sister mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. She helped create the “public science” model that brings scientific content into everyday spaces, such as public parks, subway stations, and libraries. She and Kim Arcand have co-authored five non-fiction books.