Your Ticket to the Universe: A Guide to Exploring the Cosmos

Lovely coffee table book for my cosmos loving husband. He delights in the pictures and the quality of the book.

This book would be suitable for a professional astronomer, if you have one in your circle of friends, and otherwise it is suitable for anyone who is inspired by the grandeur of the cosmos.

Great pictures. Good as gift for star enthusiast.

Beautiful and easy to understand.

I was in B&N a couple of weeks ago and came across this book. I had never read a book on a topic like this before but as I browsed through it the images caught my attention and the text didn't look overwhelming or overly-scientific. I paid $10 more to buy it from B&N right then and there rather than order through Amazon for less, as Amazon is completely reckless with every book order that I place. I am tired of ordering new books only to receive a dog eared bent up copy that was tossed around like it was in a hurricane during shipment. Amazon, take note... improve your shipping of books or lose business. Now on to the book review...I am half way through this book as I write this, but wanted to get in my thoughts thus far, which I don't expect to change. Like I said, the images caught my attention and it looked easy to read. Being in my mid-forties, I would recommend this book to anyone new to the topic and ages 13-15 and up. The only error I found was at the top of page 76. Not an error in fact, but a couple of sentences that were incomplete/jumbled. No big deal. Other than that, the book is very well written. It is definitely geared toward beginners and I think I will read this with my son in a few years when he is a little older. The chapters are short and broken down into smaller sub-sections, so you can read it in small parts which is great for those who don't have too much time to put aside.On page 109 is a great image of Saturn. What is particularly interesting about the photo though, is what at first looks like a speck of dust on the page. Upon reading the caption, you will learn that this is the earth. Yes, our planet... just a speck of dust as viewed from Saturn. From even further out in space, we are surely not even visible. It really puts you in your place... or should. Also, in reading this book, I got to thinking... we are in space, too. We don't generally think of ourselves that way, but we are spiraling around in space on this planet.In closing, this is a fun and interesting book. Next on my astronomy book-list is Far Out by Michael Benson.

"A Guide to Exploring the Cosmos" is the "Cosmos" for the 21st Century. Having access to new scientific information Carl Sagan could have only dreamed of, the authors have taken us on a tour from our own lonely back yard to the starry hosts of trillions of galaxies incomprehensible light years away.We start off with our own little world, the Earth. The authors look back on the beginning of the Solar System and how the planets were formed. They visit several forbidding places on earth such as the vents in the black chimneys of undersea volcanoes and life found in methane seeps in the Gulf of Mexico which could appropriate how life might exist elsewhere in the solar system such as Europa or another moon of the gas giants.They take us to the moon and the sun and we learn how each impacts life on Earth. We see the powerful fury of the closest star and how it impacts our Earth and our Solar System.We get a tour of the planets and their moons. We learn several interesting tidbits about each. We visit the asteroids and the Kuiper belt and our old friend the Pluto formerly known as a Planet.We visit our home Galaxy the Milky Way and discover the life cycle of stars and the types of Galaxies. We learn about super novas and red dwarfs (sans Rimmer and Kryton). We see the theories about Dark Energy and Dark Matter.The book is very enjoyable even for lay people. It is greatly enhanced by pictures and graphics on each page. There are many fabulous, breathtaking pictures taken by the Hubble space telescope which are alone good reason to add the book to your home library (there are also detailed explanations on how the pictures are taken using different kinds of light).It is a very nice book for the coffee table and young scientists.

This book is like a primer on things celestial. It starts on earth--it's surface, it's place in space--then moves out to our solar system, our galaxy, and then beyond. As such, it would be good for someone new to this topic or as a refresher for the more knowledgeable. For example, we know now that the universe is mostly dark -- dark energy and dark matter. Only about 4% of the universe comprises the stars and the planets (and people!).The authors early on address the fact of the vastness of space. (One light year is the distance light travels in a year: that's 6 Trillion miles.) Thereafter, these distances are kept to the fore. Every photo of planets, other galaxies, super-novas, etc. are captioned with their light-years from Earth. For example, Earth is 26,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way, our home galaxy.The book provides good analogies with pictures and diagrams to explain concepts necessary to understand the cosmos. For example, our unaided eyes can see only a fraction of what is going on in the universe; it's as though at a baseball game one could see only a sliver along the third base line. The rest of the field represents the other types of light, from radio waves to gamma rays.All the photographs in the book are black and white. This was not as disappointing as I thought at first it might be. In fact, there are some striking pictures. Like one of Saturn from 621,000 miles away. And another of the surface of Mars from the Rover Curiosity in 2012.What was annoying was that for many photos the captions refer to the "red" or "yellow" areas as though the pictures were in color. Careless? Sloppy? It bothered me enough to rate the book only 4 stars.