The latest book releases for curious minds

EYES IN THE SKY

SPACE TELESCOPES FROM HUBBLE TO WEBB

AUTHOR ANDREW MAY

PUBLISHER ICON BOOKS

PRICE £10.99 / $17.99

RELEASE OUT NOW

Most of us will take certain truths about space and astronomy for granted, without really questioning why or how. We’ll scan NASA press releases for the latest space news and watch documentaries, but never consider why we measure astronomical distances in light years, or how the Hubble Space Telescope can take detailed photos of celestial objects trillions of miles away that we can’t even see with the naked eye. What we need is to sit down with an expert, pick their brains and have them explain everything in layman’s terms. That’s what we’ve got in the form of the latest book from astronomer, astrophysicist and How It Works contributor Dr Andrew May.

Eyes in the Sky is about the greatest space telescopes launched by space agencies – but mostly NASA – over the last 40 years or so. It’s broken down into eight chapters that largely deal with the different flavours of telescopes for different types of astronomy. This includes Hubble, of course, the venerable visible-light telescope whose glory days are behind it. There’s also Planck, which explored the origins of the universe and the esoteric sphere of the cosmic microwave background, and Kepler, the exoplanet hunter that scanned nearby stars and found orbiting planets using a very specialist technique. Last but not least, there’s the new kid on the block – the James Webb Space Telescope.