Orbit: Nasa Astronauts Photograph the Earth

Orbit

Orbit takes the reader into space for astronauts' views of home: Cape Cod arching into the Atlantic, Mount Everest casting its shadow over lesser peaks, the sands of the Sahara arrayed in endless patterns.

Like any travelers, these voyagers in space have aimed their cameras at sights that startled their eyes. They have flown through the aurora and captured its rippling, mystic colors. They have looked down upon storms and volcanoes. And they have documented the human imprint upon the Earth: the scarred forests, the topsoil washing into the sea. As these matchless photos show, we now keep a vigil over our Earth, a vigil that will help us preserve this realm of fragile beauty.

YA. At first glance, Orbit might appear to be another glitzy coffee-table book with the rambling narrative so typical of National Geographic publications. Certainly astronaut Jay Apt has assembled what the authors describe as "the most important and beautiful photographs taken since humans first left Earth." Entertaining as the spectacular shots of our home planet are, however, the accompanying captions and chapter narratives give the full-page photographs an added immediacy that could only come from one who has actually been there. Brief historical and scientific commentary is enlivened with fascinating details. The organization of photographs and text makes Orbit a round-trip tour from blastoff to final approach along the blue-green waters of the Gulf Coast until Cape Canaveral looms into view. Readers can even keep track of the journey with the aid of miniature global maps on most pages. In addition to an index of places, there is an index to the photographs that provides exact cartographic location, date of the shot, type of camera, and lens and film used.?Cynthia J. Rieben, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The first orbiting astronaut was also the first astronaut to take pictures of the trip. John Glenn's request to carry along a camera may have stemmed in part from touristic desire to bring a bit of what he saw back to show folks, but photography quickly became a vital duty that fascinated astronauts, as it recorded much information Earth-bound scientists could obtain by no other means. This book's splendid, mostly full-and two-page images, drawn from the 34 years of orbital photography, appear in chapters titled after the part of the globe they depict (Africa, Asia, the Pacific, etc.), with one exception: the chapter devoted to that gorgeous and eerie atmospheric spectacle, the aurora (the one shown is not the borealis of northern skies but the australis of the far south). Much more could be said about these pictures (and starts to be in the lengthy captions), but the most appropriate word for them is short and childlike: wow! Ray Olson