Sometimes the only way to stop feeling so small is to make yourself feel even smaller.
Two celestial photography books are just the reminder we need of an enduring paradox: We humans are a tiny part of the heavens, yet apparently the only creatures smart enough to have documented our inadequacy through glorious galactic photography.
(Abrams) and (Firefly), should be the bookends for your holiday explorations.
The beautiful reproductions of satellite and planetary-probe images are accompanied by graceful scientific text.
Benson’s book (list price $55) starts close to home — on home, actually, with never-before-seen space photos of Earth formations, city lights at night or smoke clouds from burning rainforests. Drawing on open-access images from NASA and other agencies that he enhanced for production, Benson then moves out to the moon, to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and lonely outer moons whose very names are poetry: Enceladus, Rhea, Ganymede, Iapetus.
The Mars photos include stunning foldouts of panoramic rover shots, replete with craters, mountain ranges, tire prints. An orbiter’s photo of a dust devil is one of those jarring reminders: Yes, other planets have weather.
The Hubble book ($49.95) turns the world’s most powerful eye beyond the solar system, beyond the galaxy, beyond imagining. The mesmerizing oversize pages detail stars beginning and stars dying, galaxies crashing in distant silence, dark matter having its way with gravity.
One double-spread page looks like simple dots of stars populating a black background — until you realize Hubble is looking so far away at such a wide swath of space, each dot is actually a spinning galaxy containing billions of stars. At first glance it seems obvious that we really will never amount to even a hill of beans in this crazy world.
But then again, somebody invented that telescope. And thought of blasting it out into space where a clear night goes on forever. And invented rocket science to do it. And somehow found a way to let us keep looking through that magical lens, for years and years, across 800 million miles.
And did we mention somebody else fired a rocket at a comet and took a picture of what happened?
Feeling smaller, and better, all the time.
Michael Booth: 303-954-1686, mbooth@denverpost.com or twitter.com/mboothdp
