Michael Benson has done a superb job of capturing the solar system's alien beauty, seen through the eyes of our most intrepid robotic explorers, in this spectacular volume. I'm envious – but even more, I'm glad he did it.

-- Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon and Space

Stunning. (*****) Mostly, the best images you've ever seen of our solar system companions. I love astronomy books but I've never seen 95% of these large-format images. The detail is astounding. Some would make wonderful artwork if printed for wall display. I never knew what most of the planets looked like at such exquisite detail. Though there aren't too many Earth images, the ones included are just breathtakingly sharp, detailed and, true to life like you never saw before.

In a word, in a class by itself. The best of the best.

-- John S. Radford, Woodside, California, to Amazon.com Beyond page, February 20, 2004

I hope everyone puts Michael Benson's new book titled Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes on their holiday wish list. It has some amazing and beautifully represented images from mainly robotic space probes of our solar system. One I have never seen before stands out in particular. It's a two-page black and white spread taken by Voyager of Europa seeming to hover near Jupiter's Great Red Spot. That one alone is worth it.

-- Larry Klaes, Seti Bioastro mailing list, December 14, 2003

A Meditation on Cosmic Wonder. (*****) Why does anything at all exist rather than nothing? If the amazing wonder of pure Being has struck your heart then Beyond can aspire to become your meditative handbook. Each image can be contemplated for it's sheer beauty and can evoke awe and wonder at the mystery of creation and existence!

-- Avi Solomon, Jerusalem, Israel, to Amazon.com Beyond page, February 4, 2004

The end of 2003 has seen the publication of several spectacular astronomical picture-books. My personal favorite is Beyond by Michael Benson. As its name implies, Beyond is a compilation of images taken by spacecraft that have journeyed far beyond our Earthly horizon. Culling a few hundred of the very best images radioed back to Earth from robotic cameras onboard spacecraft hurtling through the solar system, Benson has created a visually stunning answer to the question of why we explore space.
-- Daniel Fleisch, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, Wittenberg University, Springfield Ohio, December 2003

When I was young my astronomy books had pictures of fuzzy blobs (planets) surrounded by dots (their moons), and Jupiter was shown with its Great Red Spot at the top (as seen, upside down, through telescopes). Now we have Jupiter up the right way, and beautiful photographs, detailed cartography, and even geological maps, of these planets, and of more moons than we ever knew existed. (Except Pluto. I'm considering a "probes off Pluto!" campaign -- so that there will always be at least one new planet to explore.) This book collects together a stunning array of photographs from various interplanetary probes over the last few decades. (One of the most obvious advances is that the old checkerboard mosaic pictures have here been properly processed to look continuous.) Just wallow in the images, and think how far we've come in such a short time. Who would have thought it would be the moons that would be so interesting, so diverse?

-- Susan Stepney, Professor of Computer Science, University of York, UK, December 31, 2003

Magnificent images of our solar system. (*****) Astronomy and planetary exploration have produced many spectacular pictures, often gathered together in large-format books. Beyond may be the best of them all. Benson has done more than select the most interesting images from the past forty years of solar system exploration, many of them already familiar to space buffs. He has processed those images to produce jaw-dropping pictures, some rising to the level of art. In a few cases, he has combined images to form panoramas spread out over four unfolding pages.

The book begins with the Earth and its Moon, then moves to the Sun and the other planets from Mercury out to Neptune. Some of the most impressive images show moons transiting across the faces of Mars and Jupiter. The book includes a foreword by Arthur C. Clarke. Highly recommended.

-- Michael Michaud, Dulles, Virginia, to Amazon.com Beyond page, January 14, 2004

Planets become worlds. (*****) We are used to big glossy books of pretty pictures of celestial objects. This book is more than that, though. Sure, the book is beautifully produced and the pictures are pretty (and yes, they are of celestial objects) but when you look through the pages each planet (major and minor) becomes a world--a real place you could visit. The dunefields and erosional badlands of Mars are especially compelling, along with the odd and unfamiliar grooved terrain of the moons of the outer planets.

-- Ross Sackett, Memphis, Tennessee, to Amazon.com Beyond page,
November 18, 2003

Best space photography I've seen. Superb images of the solar system with short explanatory essays. (*****) As a child of the space race era, I have been a life-long addict of astronomy, space flight and large, heavily illustrated books about space. This book by writer, filmmaker and photographer Michael Benson, is a collection of truly amazing pictures covering most of the major planetary bodies in our solar system and has been compiled from the very best space probe images from the dawn of space exploration in the early 1960s right up to on-going missions to explore the outer solar system. The book includes the Earth and Moon, the Sun, a number of asteroids, all the planets (with the exception of Pluto which has not yet been visited by space probes), and a good number of moons of other planets, notably those of Jupiter. There are many images of each object, giving a real impression of what it must be like to see these worlds for yourself. The highlights for me were: the images from Mars Global Surveyor, whose detail and resolution is stunning; the moons of Jupiter, a mini solar system in itself of incredible colour and diversity; and Saturn’s rings in superb detail. I was also amazed by the detailed radar images of the surface of cloud-covered Venus sent back by the Magellan probe, very few of which I had seen before. The text throughout the book is both interesting and informative, as are the Foreword by science-fiction grand-master and visionary Arthur C. Clarke and the Afterword by Lawrence Weschler, reporter, author and Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

There are a number of space photography books of this type on the market and I own a several of these, however, I can safely say that this book is the best example of the genre that I have come across. The images are carefully chosen and are truly awe-inspiring and I recognised only very few that I’d seen in other books or websites. The quality of the photographic reproduction is first-rate and where large mosaics have been assembled from smaller images, this has been done absolutely seamlessly. The cover photo of the crescent Neptune and its moon is like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey and like many of the pictures in this book, is almost beyond belief. If, like me, you are a big fan of space and can’t wait for humanity to get off this rock we call home and see what else is out there, then this is the book for you. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

-- Irwin McLean, Perthshire, Scotland, to Amazon.com Beyond page, December 24, 2003

Snapshots from the Edge

The presentation of (in most cases) many pictures of each world offers the reader an intimacy with not just their terrain but its unique textures; in the case of Mars, for example, the dynamic effects of water and wind erosion create a variety of forms that resemble everything from pitted metal to ocean waves to exotic alphabets to pine-clad ridges to comet storms (though in reality, most are dunefields andwindswept deserts). Other worlds appear more uniform: a densely cratered Mercury, the fractured surface of Venus, with its striations and patches, as revealed by Magellan’s cloud-piercing radar; the craters, mountains, and plains of the Moon, seen from angles impossible from Earth and including its Farside; the flares, loops, and prominences of the Sun; the roiling swirl of Jupiter’s clouds and its
retinue of distinctive moons; the intricacy (yet regularity) of Saturn’s ring system; the nondescript white haze of Uranus; the marine blue of Neptune with its dark spots and cirrus streamers; our own world’s terrain, variegated to our eyes but containing some combination of the same elements: the whites of snow, ice, and cloud, the blue and turquoise of liquid water, various Earth tones of rock and soil, the greens of plant life.

Michael Benson, who compiled the photos and wrote the accompanying text, is a documentary filmmaker who lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 1995, when he first connected to the Internet, he discovered, in his words, the pleasures of “looking through the ‘windows’ of crewless spacecraft—vessels that have seen Earth dwindle to the size of a pearl, and then a pixel, as they voyaged far beyond any place ever directly observed by human beings.” The Atlantic Monthly has called him a “deskbound cosmic pilgrim”, a fitting title for someone who sifted through each of the tens of thousands of photos taken by the Voyager spacecraft as they passed Jupiter and Saturn, every Mars photo sent home by the two Viking orbiters, every shot taken by the Lunar Orbiter missions of the mid-1960s, as well as huge numbers of images taken by SOHO, Galileo, Magellan, and others of our mechanical emissaries in preparing the book. He worked with one of the best image processors in the planetary sciences community, Paul Geissler, to render the color as accurately as possible. (Most of the early images, before the days of CCDs, are compilations of several images taken through different filters that had to be combined.)

Benson writes passionately about the craft that we have sent forth: “Intricate space probes—encased in scarabaeoid shells, festooned with scopes and scanners, and driven by solar-powered cells and radio-isotope thermo-electric generators—are redefining the limits of human knowledge.” He talks of these autonomous servants of ours almost as if they’re alive; he discusses how even though the Mars Pathfinder lander lost power in 1997, the solar-powered Sojourner rover (according to NASA) is probably still roaming the vicinity [sic], trying to communicate with its parent craft. In his foreword, Clarke runs with the concept of these robots perhaps being the next step in our evolution, one that could someday replace us. Be that as it may, they have taken some extraordinary images, and this book presents a wonderful sample of them.

-- Tony Hoffman, “Eyepiece” (newsletter of the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York), March 2004