Customer Reviews

Beyond: Visions Of The Interplanetary Probes

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

We are used to big glossy books of pretty pictures of celestial objects. This book is more than that, though. Sure, the book is beautifully produced and the pictures are pretty (and yes, they are of celestial objects) but when you look through the pages each planet (major and minor) becomes a world--a real place you could visit. The dunefields and erosional badlands of Mars are especially compelling, along with the odd and unfamiliar grooved terrain of the moons of the outer planets.

Before I opened up my amazon package yesterday and laid my eyes upon this book, it had been a while since I had held such a well made and beauftifully put together piece. Not having looked at its dimensions before purchasing, I was impressed by the book's size. There are images on almost every page, and they are extremely detailed and vivid. In my experience, this is one of the nicest astrophotography books on the market. A true treasure.

Mostly, the best images you've ever seen of our solar system companions. I love astronomy books but I've never seen 95% of these large-format images. The detail is astounding. Some would make wonderful artwork if printed for wall display. I never knew what most of the planets looked like at such exquisite detail. Though there aren't too many Earth images, the ones included are just breathtakingly sharp, detailed and, true to life like you never saw before.

In a word, in a class by itself. The best of the best.

Astronomy and planetary exploration have produced many spectacular pictures, often gathered together in large-format books. Beyond may be the best of them all. Benson has done more than select the most interesting images from the past forty years of solar system exploration, many of them already familiar to space buffs. He has processed those images to produce jaw-dropping pictures, some rising to the level of art. In a few cases, he has combined images to form panoramas spread out over four unfolding pages.

The book begins with the Earth and its Moon, then moves to the Sun and the other planets from Mercury out to Neptune. Some of the most impressive images show moons transiting across the faces of Mars and Jupiter. The book includes a foreword by Arthur C. Clarke. Highly recommended.

What makes this book impressive is the quality of the photographs. The emphasis is clearly on the photographs, not on the text. The book contains a great amount of extremely detailed photographs of the solar system. Many of them I've never seen before in any book or on internet.

In selecting the photographs, the author did not aim at covering all objects of the solar system. For example, of Saturnus only the rings are shown, albeit very extensively. Uranus (including its moons Ariel and Miranda) is shown by only five photographs. Neptunus and its moon Triton is covered by eleven photographs. Pluto is not represented at all, because detailed photographs are not available.

The most extensive chapters cover Mars and Jupiter. With Mars the emphasis is on photographs that are taken by the many orbiting spacecraft that visited this planet (Viking Orbiter, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey). A few nice photographs of the tiny moons Phobos and Deimos and two photographs taken on the surface of Mars are also included. The chapter about Jupiter contains very nice photographs of Jupiter itself and the four Galilean moons. Especially Europa and Io are very extensively represented.
Venus is shown by a multitude of very detailed radar scans of Magellan. Mercury is shown by photographs made in the 1974 and 1975 by Mariner 10. The photographs of our own moon are older still, from the various Lunar Orbiters in the years '60. The sun is represented by a set of quite recently taken and very impressive photographs. There is even a chapter about asteroids, with some photographs of Eros (taken by NEAR), Gaspra and Ida, with its satellite Dactyl.

The text in this book is relatively sparse. It is partly informative (covering aspects of the represented solar objects or space probes) or philosophical in nature. The text is generally quite readable.

Finally a personal note. Many photographs in this book are pure art. All praise be then to the artist who made it all, our Creator!

I am floored every time I open this book of pictures of our Solar System. The images are so amazing and clear. I sometimes wonder that these are actually our neighboring planets.

The main planets themselves are mind-blowing in and of themselves. Io is perhaps the single most jaw dropping moon - a planet in its own right - and evokes so much imagination. Gallisto is also a fascinating moon with its craters coming to life.

Only two regrets with this book. First, the pictures of the moon were not satisfying at all. They didn't portray the moon in any way that is as beautiful as the rest of the solar system. Instead the pictures focus on close up pictures of its surface, which is interesting as well, yet I would have still liked to see whole far off pictures of the moon. And lastly, one of Saturn's moons is mentioned in passing - Titan - as perhaps the most interesting and fascinating of the solar system, and yet it isn't included. Why? Because they didn't want to detract from Saturn and its rings! Including Titan, if it is as fascinating as they are saying, would only add more to Saturn.

Both are trivial and it doesn't in any way change my view of this fantastic collection of pictures of our Solar System. This is a must for all households. A definite recommend.

5 stars.

I went looking for a book of photos of the solar system after viewing a fabulous display at the Smithsonian. This book has absolutely gorgeous photos of the solar system. It was exactly what I wanted. However, I tried to be frugal and buy the paperback version. After I gently looked through it, the binding was already falling apart. Buy this product but spring for the hardback version!

I purchased this book on the premise that since it had a publication date of 2008, it would have fairly new pictures from the later space probe missions such as Cassini-Huygens and MESSENGER. Unfortunately upon opening the book and skimming through it and checking the copyright date, it does not have any photos later than 2003 in it. I am very disappointed that the publisher would choose to republish a 5 year-old astronomy book without revising it with newer material first. Nevertheless, this book contains a ton of pictures from all the planets in the Solar System taken by Voyager, Galileo, Mariner, Viking, the various circa 2003 Mars probes, Magellan, and an in-transit Cassini probe at Jupiter. If you're looking for the latest pictures circa 2008-2009, you'll be very disappointed by this book. If you just want beautiful pictures of the planets this book has it in spades.

beautiful coffee table book. not the sort of thing you sit and read, but great to have out when guests come over. fantastic images.

I was fortunate to catch a smaller version of the exhibit, "The Smithsonian Presents: BEYOND, Visions of Planetary Landscapes", at the Petaluma Museum a couple weeks ago. The photos blew me away, and I immediately went on-line to see if I could find more.

What I found was this book, by Michael Benson, who is behind the digital processing that created the photos in the exhibit and the book. Digital processing is needed because these photos are created from montages of the many individual satellite photos needed to cover a large area. I decided to spring for the hardcover version of this book, and am glad I did. There are several fold-out images, and the quality of a hardback was worth it.

I was ready for a coffee-table book with great photos. What surprised, me, though, was how much I enjoyed the accompanying text. The photographic images are first and foremost in this book, but this is also great reading! For example, here's the beginning of the chapter on the planet Venus: "We shouldn't read too much into the fact that Venus, nominally the planet of love, was revealed by squadrons of Soviet and American probes in the 1970s to be a broiling hell, with a 900 degree Fahrenheit surface temperature hotter even than Mercury's and an atmosphere busy drizzling such Valentines Day surprises as sulfuric acid. Far more interesting is the fact that the surface of this inferno - a place where the rocks glow: a place as pressurizd as a submarine trench - was revealed to be so incomparably beautiful by the unwinking radar eye of the early 1990s Magellan probe."

As mentioned, each image is the result of digitally combining, with the greatest care, the multiple images from the various probes. This is even harder than it sounds, because a finished photo, covering any great geographic distance, is the combination of many different passes of the satellite, as it continually orbits the planet taking photos of a slightly different longitude each time.

Many of the photos are black & white, but there are also spectacular color photos. Benson explains that, as much as possible, he reflected only "true" colors. Neptune, for example, is really blue, just as Mars is really red. The only exception to this are the photos of the sun itself. Obviously, the "true" color of the sun is simply bright white light. What Benson gives us, though, are photos taken in wavelengths that can't be seen by the naked eye. They give us a sun with a varying roiling incredible surface, where the cooler areas (those only 6000 degrees or so) are darker than the rest.

This book has many more photos than were shown in the exhibit I saw, but, on the other hand is missing one of the most arresting. This was a view of Saturn, showing the rings exactly side-on. The depth of the rings is so narrow, compared to the planet they circle, that in the black & white photo, the rings were reduced to a thin white line in front of the planet. It looked like a crease in the paper or an optical mistake! I was fascinated.

This book was published in 2003 and still counts Pluto as a planet. It doesn't make any difference, because no probe had ever been sent to Pluto, anyway. That will hopefully change, in a far distant edition. The U.S. launched the First Pluto Space Mission in January 2006. Unfortunately, the probe won't reach Pluto until 2014 at the earliest.

If you can get to the Smithsonian exhibit, I highly recommend it. There are oversized 3-5 feet high photos that are wonderful, and this book is the perfect accompaniment.