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

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.

"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.

Beautiful and easy to understand.

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.