Solar System / Hubble: The Mirror on the Universe

The glorious vistas of outer space have thrilled humans since the invention of the telescope. Equally thrilling is this month’s Dual Featured Selection, which offers a spectacular journey across the cosmos. Solar System, based on the hit ebook Solar System for iPad, shows you the sun, planets, and other denizens of our planetary neighborhood as you’ve never seen them before. And Hubble, Third Edition, draws on the latest images and science of the magnificent orbiting telescope.

Solar System

Think you’re an expert on the solar system? Here’s a book that might surprise you. Adorned by hundreds of NASA photographs furnished especially for this project, as well as computer-generated images, Solar System begins with a fascinating overview of our planetary environs. This includes double-page 3D maps of the solar system with planetary orbits plotted to scale. The book is then organized by world in order of distance from the sun. From the dramatic birth of the solar system, we go on to encounter the eight planets as 21st century astronomy reveals them.

Every orb is introduced with a big, beautiful, full-page image, and a databox that shows its orbit and position in relation to surrounding bodies. Also provided are its diameter, mass, and volume, as well as its surface temperature, atmospheric makeup, orbital period and more. Cross-section views reveal the interior structure of each planet as far as we can ascertain it. Marcus Chown offers accessible descriptions of what we’ve learned and are yet to learn about that world.

You’ll dive down into the canyons of Mars; surf right across the rings of Saturn; fly over the volcanoes of Jupiter’s moon Io; and sail through the fiery loops of gas that erupt from our sun. On one page, a mosaic of three images taken of Venus’s night side shows the thermal radiation emitted from clouds at a height of 15-20 km. On another page, we witness layered deposits around the Martian north pole, with alternating sections of water ice and windblown dust. You’ll learn about asteroids such as Gaspra and Ida, as well as some of the most prominent Kuiper Belt objects including Eris, Makemake, and Haumea. We even zoom out to the Oort Cloud to witness the origin of comets.

Reading through Solar System is the next best thing to hopping onto a spaceship and visiting each planet yourself.

Hubble, Third Edition

After nearly 22 years in orbit, 30,000 astronomical targets, and over 700,000 images, the Hubble Space Telescope continues to return pictures and data that amaze us. This new and updated edition of Hubble features 300 full-color images, coverage of the telescope’s most important and fascinating new discoveries, and a summary of the achievements of the orbiting observatory to date.

Carole Stott, working on behalf of her late coauthor Robin Kerrod, has divided the new edition into sections that display and describe images of stars and stellar death, galaxies, galactic clusters, planets, and more. Examples of new photographs in this edition include a long-exposure image that captures the faint details of spiral galaxy NGC 4911 within the Coma Cluster of galaxies, 320 million light years away; and a composite “mash-up” image of two colliding galaxies located about 62 million light years from Earth, taken by the Hubble along with the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

One spread is devoted to Centaurus A, a powerful radio source in the sky that is identified with the galaxy NGC 5128. A visible-light image shows the bright central region of the galaxy, measuring about 30,000 light-years across. A second image on the same spread shows clusters of hot blue stars lining the edges of the galaxy’s dust lane, while a third image presents a radio image of Centaurus A.

Another spread, devoted to Mars, features a composite photograph with seven shots of the red planet taken by the Hubble telescope