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The dean of science-writers for the grammar-school set offers comments on over a dozen big, dramatic photos and photo collages generated by the Hubble Space Telescope, from a sharply focused triple image of Mars to a tiny red arc identified as the most distant galaxy every observed. Most of the pictures look thousands of light years into space—to star “nurseries,” remnants of massive explosions, clouds surrounding black holes, colliding galaxies, and less identifiable phenomena. In his characteristically matter-of-fact way, Simon (Seymour Simon’s Book of Trains, p. 51, etc.) describes just what the viewer is seeing, puts it into astronomical context, and even mentions, sometimes, how or why certain shots were taken. Though this is nothing like a complete picture of what the Hubble has added to our knowledge of the visible universe, it will leave even readers who are not scientifically inclined with both a clearer understanding of modern astronomy’s frontiers, and an enhanced sense of wonder at the starscape’s vast, turbulent beauty. (Nonfiction. 9-11)
