The Planets Book

[Stub Mandrel]

I picked up a really nice book in The Works yesterday, 'The Planets - the definitive visual guide to our solar system'. A Doring Kindersley hardback in 2014, paperback version this year, only £6.

Produced with involvement of Maggie Aderin-Pocock its 256 pages, lots of really good images including quality illustrations and lost of NASA imagery, plenty of well written text that appears to be well written , accurate and not too in 'sensationalist headline' style. In fact it's not a noddy introductory guide but a great update and complement to my lovely but incredibly out of date Cambridge Photographic Atlas of the Planets.

Sadly it's most recent stuff is pre-New Horizons and latest Cassini images - they probably wanted to republish it as a paperback ahead of producing an updated version? But does have the Hubble images of Pluto and at least one Spitzer image.

It does underline how rapidly our knowledge of the solar system is growing, if the Cambridge Atlas and this were updated in a few years time, the two together would be a really good combination.

[billyharris72]

I got this for my wife a couiple of years ago and she really liked it. It's a very visually attractive book, with great images and surprisingly detailed content. They also do one called The Universe, which is equally nice, though a bit more involved. I'd really expected both of them to be the usual glossy coffee table pap, but the level is much higher than I expected, well written and accessible. My missus gave up on the latter but one of these days I might pick it up myself.

Billy.