Galaxies - by Govert Schilling (Paperback)

About the Book

"Featuring the most recent, best, and even startling images with detailed captions highlighting accessible text, Galaxies shows the restless universe beyond our atmosphere. Photographs are from more than 30 of the world's largest ground-based telescopes."--

Book Synopsis

A sweeping tour of the galaxies, from our Milky Way to infinity.

Galaxies are glittering islands in the Universe, interwoven in the web of Dark Matter. From Earth's mountaintops enormous telescopes peer deep beyond the Milky Way, while space telescopes locate majestic images, and through seemingly miraculous technology, capture them for us to look at and learn with amazement.

Featuring the most recent, best, and even startling images with detailed captions highlighting accessible text, Galaxies shows the restless universe beyond our atmosphere. Photographs are from more than 30 of the world's largest ground-based telescopes, including the largest to date, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Images are also featured from the Hubble Space Telescope, which has continued to operate long past its expected life and to astound and astonish stargazers worldwide.

Here is the glory of the galaxies:

• The Milky Way, our Galaxy -- Stellar Nurseries, Stars and Planets, When Stars Die; In the Heart of the Milky Way; Mapping the Milky Way
• Our Galactic Neighborhood -- The Magellanic Clouds; the Andromeda Galaxy; The Triangulum Galaxy; Satellite Galaxies
• How far away are the stars?
• The Gallery of Galaxies -- Spiral Galaxies; Barred Spiral Galaxies; Elliptical, Lenticular and Dwarf Galaxies; Dark Matter; The Expanding Universe
• Monsters and Black Holes -- Twisting Galaxies; Colliding Galaxies; Active Galactic Nuclei and Quasars; Supermassive Black Holes; Giant Eyes for the Sky
• Clusters of Galaxies -- Cosmic Clusters; Gravitational Lensing; Dark Forces; The Large-scale Structure of the Universe; Looking Back in Time
• Birth and Evolution -- At the Edge of Space and Time; The First Galaxies; The Beginning of the Universe; Dark Energy; Cosmology.

Review Quotes

[Review of hardcover: ] Gorgeous double-page spreads of galaxies accompany discussions of their dimensions, puzzles, groupings, sometimes-bizarre shapes, and why humans still don't know the true nature of some galaxies. The combination of full color images and new scientific discoveries makes Galaxies: Birth and Destiny of Our Universe a particularly suitable replacement for aging astronomy titles reposing in science and general interest library collections.--Diane Donovan "Donovan's Literary Services" (1/1/2020 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Govert Schilling is an internationally acclaimed astronomy writer. He is a contributing editor of Sky and Telescope and his articles have appeared in Science, New Scientist and BBC Sky at Night magazines. He is the author of more than 50 books on a wide variety of astronomical topics.