Author(s): GOVERT SCHILLING

Pop Science

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. It will not be until 2025 that an even larger telescope, the Giant Magellan Telescope, will join its neighbor in the mountains of Chile and open a wider window into the dark Universe. 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.