A Journey Through Time : Exploring the Universe with the Hubble Space Telescope

Featuring two hundred spectacular full-color photographs, the first pictures from the four-story Hubble Space Telescope provide a dramatic look at the universe over twelve billion years. Tour.

A glossy collection of 200 astounding pictures showcases Hubble's revelations since astronauts repaired the telescope in 1993. No longer are stars featureless points of light, galaxies fuzzy whirls, or nebulae murky clouds of color. Detail transforms the objects into convulsive, agitated tableaux of cosmic birth and death. In the immediate neighborhood, the telescope enables a steadier observation of the planets than can fly-by spacecraft (spectacularly so in the case of last year's Jupiter-comet collision), and the authors open with a gallery of the solar system. Their text strives to excite as much as the pictures do, and does that well enough for readers who have never heard how hot Venus is or must have the concept of the light-year explained. From such rudiments, the eye rushes to the images of startling discoveries: protoplanetary disks around new stars or the still-expanding fireball of a 10,000-year-old supernova. Expect certain interest in these awesome photos, and perhaps back it with The Hubble Wars by Eric Chaisson , the technical story of the telescope. Gilbert Taylor

Barbree, coauthor of Moonshot (LJ 4/15/94) and a TV space journalist, and science fiction novelist Caidin survey the universe as seen by modern astronomers. Their prose is lush, and the color photographs are beautiful. After opening with an account of the initial failure of the Hubble optical system and its repair by a skilled and daring team of astronauts, the authors drift away from the Hubble story for whole chapters at a time; the text and the photos are derived from many sources, not just the Hubble Telescope. Compared with Carolyn Peterson's Hubble Vision (LJ 11/15/95), this new book is far more readable for the general public, but it gives far less scientific and technical detail and tells disappointingly less about the Hubble Telescope's work. Recommended chiefly for public and secondary school libraries.?Jack W. Weigel, Univ. of Michigan Lib., Ann Arbor
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.