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Galaxies: Inside the Universe's Star Cities
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About Galaxies: Inside The Universe's Star Cities
Product Description Tour the incredible scope of the cosmos as we know it with the editor in chief of Astronomy, featuring jaw-dropping illustrations and full-color photography from the magazine’s archives, much of it never before published. “The natural history of the galaxies is majestic and deserves its own David Attenborough. In David Eicher, it may have just found him.”—Richard Dawkins Journey to the edges of our galaxy and beyond with one of the most widely recognized astronomy experts as your guide. Delve into the history of stargazing and space observation, learn how black holes power galaxies, and understand the classification of the different galaxy types. This illuminating book—with artful illustrations and never-before-seen space photography—will open your mind to the wonders of the universe that await. Review “I love this book. It represents a new giant leap in our ability to visualize the universe. For me, reading it was a shocking realization that I must now update my mental picture of the cosmos.” —Brian May, astrophysicist and founding member of Queen “Strikingly illustrated with high-definition photographs captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and research observatories, the book is a celebration of the beauty, symmetry, and scale of these glittering assemblages of stars scattered across the evening sky.” —Sierra magazine “The natural history of the galaxies is majestic and deserves its own David Attenborough. In David Eicher, it may have just found him.” —Richard Dawkins, emeritus fellow, University of Oxford About the Author David J. Eicher is one of the most widely recognized astronomy enthusiasts in the world. He is editor in chief of Astronomy magazine and of the international Asteroid Day project. He has also written shows for the Adler Planetarium and for NASA, and is the coauthor, with Brian May, of Mission Moon 3-D and the author of The New Cosmos. In addition to appearances on CNN, Fox News, and NPR, Dave regularly lectures on science and astronomy at Harvard University, the Starmus Festival, and the American Museum of Natural History. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction When I was fourteen years old, I was invited to a “star party” in the little town of Oxford, Ohio, where I grew up. Someone had a six-inch telescope there, and I was immediately entranced by the realization that I could walk outside into a yard and gaze deeply into the universe. It was Saturn that caught my attention at that first star party, but soon I was out in a large cornfield in the back of my own subdivision, night after night, exploring the sky with a simple pair of 7x50 binoculars. What a spectacular summer of binocular stargazing that was! I knew almost nothing of the sky, and had no telescope. Every new view was a discovery, whether it was scanning along the glistening backdrop of the Milky Way, spotting a star cluster, or coming across a bright and colorful star. I took the first steps in a deep knowledge of the sky that summer, something that too few stargazers now possess, in an era of computerized go-to telescopes. Soon I wandered my binoculars’ field of view into the Great Square of Pegasus, and across the nearby constellation Andromeda. The glow I encountered there, like a bright hazy star surrounded by an elongated, oval fuzz, I soon learned was a pretty special “deep-sky object.” I had stumbled onto the Andromeda Galaxy, and as soon as I learned what it was, I also learned to see it with my eye alone under our dark Ohio sky. In fact, for most people, it is the most distant object visible to the unaided human eyes. The Andromeda Galaxy is a galaxy like our Milky Way, located some 2.5 million lightyears away—that’s 57 million trillion kilometers, a long hike. (Under perfect sky conditions, some experienced observers claim to see more distant galaxies like M33 and M81 with the naked eye.) Until the early 1920s, no one knew what galaxies were. Moreover, th
