Description

Anyone with a little extra cash and a plane ticket can take a “grand tour” of Europe. But a tour of the Solar System? Now that’s an experience deserving of the word grand. Introducing the new edition of the book praised as “spectacular” (London Times), “eye-boggling” (Future Life),“concise and informative . . . the colorful and imaginative paintings steal the show” (Chicago Tribune), with “page after page filled with new color paintings, each the well-controlled evocation of a spectacular scene” (Scientific American).Originally published in 1981 and revised in 1993, The Grand Tour, an astronomy classic with 196,000 copies in print, takes readers on an imaginative trip through every corner of the solar system, in much the same way as Cook’s once took travelers on a grand tour of the Continent.

Completely updated and revised and drawing on discoveries made by Voyager I and II, Magellan, Galileo, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Mars Global Surveyor Mission and other space initiatives, The Grand Tour is a dazzling journey that combines lush art and up-to-the-minute science. One hundred new paintings give travelers an unprecedented view of phenomena such as Saturn’s rings from Saturn itself; the rusty-red dune fields of Mars; the rugged surface of Mercury, saturated with impact craters; and the Kuiper Belt of planetesimals, the largest of which is Pluto—now considered a half-planet. From the vast reaches of Jupiter to tiny frozen Rhea, like a snowball orbiting around Saturn, it is a journey of astonishing proportions.