Ice, Rock, and Beauty

The wonders of the moons and planets of the Solar System have captivated people across the world for generations... but now we can experience so much more of the the Sun’s corner of the cosmos – our home among the stars. The richness of images – dwarf planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and planetary rings, all the way out to the Kuiper Belt and the icy bodies of the Oort Cloud – has only become richer since the onset of space exploration and since the first edition of this book! The evolution of images of Pluto, for one, from the faintest dot through to the fantastic surface detail revealed by NASA’s New Horizons mission is just one of the breakthrough stories from the last decade and featured in this book. The book also explores the most recent NASA imagery of the moons of Saturn, such as Enceladus with its fountains of ice bursting from inner oceans, and of oily lakes seen through Titan’s hazy atmosphere. Additionally, this updated and extended edition features new models of the pathways of huge numbers of asteroids, intimate close-ups of comets, and colorful representations of the subtle gravitational variations across the surface of our own companion, the Moon. There is indeed a vast diversity of ice and rock, and certainly a whole lot of newly discovered beauty waiting to be explored, by you, in every chapter.
This stunning collection of images provides a new look at the Solar System made possible by recent exciting missions such as Cassini as well as by other probes and by Earth-based imaging. The book takes advantage of the rich pool of images that is available to tell a story of the Solar System that has not been told before. The images, all from the public domain but not hitherto gathered into a coherent collection, are supported by text and graphics. Each main image is accompanied by a graphic showing the location in the Solar System of the featured object. All of these graphics are based in a template providing a simple representation of the Solar System. The text itself is not extensive, allowing page design to have a high priority. The book is intended for anybody who lives in solar orbit and takes a general interest in the solar neighborhood.