Just as it was the case with my previous work throughout the years, such as my first book, “Vargic’s Miscellany of Curious Maps“, the main focus of this book is highly visual (however, it still contains a lot of interesting info in the text that accompanies every sheet). On the pages that follow, you will find thousands of detailed original illustrations, aiming to showcase the many different and colorful facets of the cosmos, and our role in exploring it.
In this book, I plan to take you step-by-step on a lavishly illustrated journey across our universe.
I aim to examine and visually depict the variety of diverse and fascinating conceptions about the form of the universe held by our ancestors from many different cultures. Then we will unravel the Earth’s atmosphere and a brief history of how has humanity manages to surpass the countless challenges presented to us by nature in our journey towards reaching the weightlessness of the the Earth’s orbit.
The next chapter, the “Scale of the Universe“ is a journey that will carry you from the orbit through the various asteroids and small moons of the Solar System, to planets and exoplanets, red, brown and white stellar dwarfs, into the domain of the largest stars, accretion disks of quasars and great interstellar nebulae - the cradles of stars. With every page on a far larger scale as the last, we will gradually zoom out to one of the largest structures of the cosmos we know about - the local supercluster of galaxies.
The pages that follow deal with the aspect of human exploration of the cosmos - the “Timeline of Space Exploration“ is a chronicle of the most important achievements in both unmanned and manned spaceflight from the launch of Sputnik to the planned missions in outer space expected to take place from the 2020s to the late 2030s.
The next section is focused on the evolution that rocket science has went through over the last 70 years. It includes highly detailed illustrations of more than 95 orbital and suborbital rockets from 15 countries, beginning with the famous V2 missile, and ending with some of the most ambitious rocket models that are currently in the development stage, such as NASA’s “Space Launch System“, Jeff Bezos’s “New Glenn“ or the United Launch Alliance’s “Vulcan” rocket. A quick addendum then showcases (to-scale) the most powerful earth and space-based observatories - the main instruments we use to learn about distant universe.
What follows is a brief showcase of the landscapes and most iconic geographical features of the five large rocky objects in the inner solar system - Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon and Mars, in a series of maps, constructed using the best-quality orbital and radar imagery available. Finally, the last segment of this book is dedicated towards the “timeline of the universe” in 36-pages, that will take you on a grand voy- age from the first picosecond of the universe, through all the 13.5 billion years of our universe’s existence, towards the events that the near and far future has in store for us, the Earth and the cosmos as a whole
It is complemented by dedicated graphics about topics such as elementary particles, classification of galaxies, formation and evolution of the solar system, major orbital cycles our planets Earth goes through during hundreds of thousands of years, and even the extent of how has our night sky changed just during the geologically very recent past.
All in all, I hope you will enjoy reading this book at least as much as I enjoyed crafting and writing it - and that it will make you better appreciate and understand the complex and fascinating inner workings of the universe that we have found ourselves in.
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