 |  | Featured Book:
The Universe: 365 Days
by Jerry T. Bonnell and Robert J. Nemiroff | 
| "Travel to Mercury. See planet Earth from the Moon. Watch as stars are born and die. Discover the cosmos! How? Read this book.
The images in this book comprise three hundred and sixty-five of the authors' selections from the popular website Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). The best and most interesting entries from six years of these daily web offerings have now been gleaned, groomed, and otherwise made presentable in print. Many of the pictures are presented here in finer detail than ever before. The book does not represent a major advance for galactic civilization ... but it does have galaxies in it.
As a website, APOD was first conceived during a freewheeling brainstorming session on the future and value of the World Wide Web, then in its infancy. The setting was NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center where the authors shared an office in the Compton Observatory Science Support Center in 1995. One perspective that repeatedly emerged from the often calm and occasionally well-reasoned discussion was that the web could be viewed as a continually developing encyclopedia that still lacked many of the significant entries. How could be contribute?
We agreed that a simple presentation of an astronomy picture with a supporting hyperlinked text, ultimately as astronomy picture of the day, would be the most practical for us, considering that we were really supposed to be professional astronomers. So, following a long-standing tradition in science, we immediately went back to our normal work and ongoing research projects and did nothing about it ..."
-- from the Introduction |
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| | In 1995, Robert J. Nemiroff, Associate Professor of Physics at the Michigan Technological University and Jerry T. Bonnell an astrophysicist with the Universities Space Research Association teamed up with NASA to create the wildly popular Astronomy Picture of the Day website.
And now, with the publication of The Universe: 365 Days, they're finally going to make some real money.
The book reproduces in amazing clarity 365 spectacular images culled from the thousands that have been featured on the site.
Bonnell and Nemiroff took time off from scouring the universe to answer some of SPACE.com's questions. |  |
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Untitled
SPACE.com: Who are your heroes in the realm of astronomy?
Jerry T.Bonnell: My personal heroes, the ones who inspired me and seemed to know the answer to life the universe and everything, were my mentors at the University of Oklahoma, David Branch and Tibor Herczeg, and my thesis advisor Roger Bell at the University of Maryland.
Robert J. Nemiroff: I'll go with dead people so as to remain employable. Leonhard Euler (the Swiss mathematician) because he was rumored to be able to work even with kids and cats crawling all over him. Einstein because he thought so much about reality that he made it into a really cool geometric place. Sagan because he was so good at balancing being both a scientist and communicator.
The book is one hefty tome, was it fun fitting the universe into a coffee table book? Did you consider doing a much larger version?
Bonnell: Well ... the idea for "The Universe: 365 Days" book was suggested to us by our publisher, Eric Himmel (at Harry Abrams Inc.), and as a book it is similar in size and format to another Abrams published book "The Earth From Above". Of course, "Universe" is based on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) website that really has featured a picture a day for about eight years now. It was difficult, and we ended up putting a lot of work into picking and choosing from the thousands of images we had compiled there. Since we did have to fit the universe into a coffee table book I think it's only reasonable that you need a good sturdy coffee table to hold it up.
Nemiroff: Yes, but we were told that 365 was the total number of days in a year and that this was not negotiable. We thought of petitioning Pope Gregory XIII but couldn't find his e-mail address.
If you could travel to any of the places pictured on your website and in your book, where would you most like to go?
Bonnell: Actually, I often do travel to places we feature since we certainly include pictures of planet Earth on the website. Hawaii and London are currently two of my favorite places in the Solar System. The rest of the universe looks like it could be pretty dangerous. Can you imagine camping out next to an x-ray binary?
Nemiroff: Houghton, Michigan. That is where dinner usually waits for me. (My wife cooks, I clean the dishes.) I'd go to a black hole, but I think that dinner would be cold by the time I returned (twin paradox).
What most upsets you about science or scientists?
Bonnell: While they haven't cornered the market in personality flaws, some of the most annoying people I've ever met are scientists. I'm almost certain this doesn't reflect on my own generally gregarious nature.
Nemiroff: They sometimes dodge questions they don't want to answer.
Do you get a lot of e-mail from people who see "other things" in some photos?
Bonnell: Yes. Understandably, people seem to see faces mostly ... Gene Shallot, Groucho Marx, and cows are popular choices.
Nemiroff: Some, but surprising little to my expectation. I guess we've already been branded incurable skeptics.
When researching the text for images, do you find astronomers accessible and helpful?
Bonnell: Yes ... generally helpful and enthusiastic.
Nemiroff: So far, without exception.
Do you lean toward selecting photos that are scientifically valuable, pretty, or must they be both?
Bonnell: The "perfect" picture would be both aesthetically interesting and scientifically dazzling. I am amazed that I've seen so many come so close to this ideal (... and some of them actually made it into the book!). But I'm also fond of images that are interesting just because they are historically or scientifically significant. Of course, there are some pictures that just visually grab you.
Nemiroff: If either the immature teenager or the mature scientist inside me says "cool", I'll try to APOD it.
Hubble and other observatories have seen so much. Is there any particular picture you want to see?
Bonnell: To me, images from amateur astronomers are often as compelling as those from Hubble or other major space and ground-based observatories. I think i'd have trouble picking out any particular object, though. While i've always been a sucker for a big, beautiful spiral galaxy, I note that i'm often most entertained by pictures of "geocentric" celestial events ... like eclipses, meteor showers, star trails, etc.
Nemiroff: Well I'll take this opportunity to put in a shameless plug for the Night Sky Live project that I direct. We're trying to make a continuous real-time image of the entire night sky available instantly to anyone right on the web. So that is the image I'd most like to see. We're making real progress -- we have designed and deployed fisheye web-cameras (called CONtinuous CAMeras, or CONCAMs) around the globe -- check us out on-line at http://concam.net . And we always need smart people to volunteer to help out -- mostly to write more and better analyses code right now.
What is the most beautiful aspect to space?
Bonnell: That it is there for us to wonder about.
Nemiroff: That it's so open to adventure on scales from the very small to the very large.
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