SPACEBOURNE

This book became famous as the suggestion in Chris Hadfield's 'An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth' for its excellent quality artistic photos. It proves the talent of Don Pettit as being not only a well trained astronaut, but also a professional photographer, and the printing quality of these pictures is excellent. It is a collection of stunning photographs from the ISS, a space station in continual freefall, and they are spellbinding images of our planet, its cities, weather patterns and landforms, a rainbow of blurry colourful stars shooting by, aerial shots of such familiar cities as Cairo where you can try and spot the pyramids, the Panama Canal, Chicago and nightscapes of cities with scatterings of lights in patterns, light and dark all with a story to tell. An urban core shaped by a modern master plan appears as a matrix laid out in a perfect grid. Older cities have more organic, even chaotic shapes. The scattered lights of the countryside form fractal patterns that resemble a snapshot from Mandelbrot space. 'I've lived in space for months on end. Light patterns readily become a guide to the part of the world passing below.' The Northern Lights, a European Space Agency un-piloted cargo vehicle approaches the ISS snorting fire from its nozzles, the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun in June 2012, there are even pictures of the Space Station toilet! See an Expedition 31 crew portrait, submerged coral sand dunes in the Bahamas, an erupting volcano in Patagonia, an asteroid impact crater, the Mongolian desert and even some amazing shots in black and white for the eyes to discover as new pleasures and new perspectives come into focus. Page after page covering nighttime, black and white, infrared, inner space, cities by night, star trails and shooting space which are the most spectacular colours. Save £40! 176pp, 25.4 x 33cm.
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