The Planets: Photographs From The Archives Of NASA by Nirmala Nataraj (book review).
There is one major observation you get when you look at the pictures in Nirmala Nataraj’s book ‘The Planets: Photographs From The Archives Of NASA’, you are looking at alien worlds and they belong to our Solar System. So close and photographs are the only way to really see them. If that alone doesn’t convince you to buy this book, what will?
It’s even more remarkable that we have managed to send space probes to see them and in some cases with the outer planets, like the Voyagers and Juno, only a couple times at that. You then have to wonder why these photos will take your breath away.
I wish with the Venus radar photos showing beneath the clouds that as well as showing the colour depths, that they’d also included what the scale the colours represented. Some of the photos throughout the book will inform of distance they were photographed from but scale is everything.
Even though I’ve seen photos of Mars at ground level before, seeing them together here is a reminder in context that this is an alien planet and in astronomical terms, it’s on our doorstep and no one but our machines have visited it yet. If anything, I wish we could see some of the mountain ranges and deep ravines but I doubt if we’d risk losing the landers there.
Looking at the photos of Jupiter and seeing the red spot is finally beginning to vanish in a big way makes me wonder if it will happen in my lifetime and, more importantly, will another one erupt? After all, the photos in his book shows this as a common phenomenon throughout the gaseous covers of the outer planets.
Seeing how the Cassini probe photographed Saturn and its moons, which a lot of the time were tiny specs, gives a true idea of the scale of things surrounding the ringed planet. It was also interesting see the giant storm at one of Saturn’s poles.
With the pictures of Uranus and it being the only planet whose on its side compared to the rest, it’s no wonder that its rings were missed until the fly-by. Considering its gaseous atmosphere, you do have to wonder what hit it so hard to do that to it. The photos of Neptune and the reveal of its own ‘Small Dark Spot’ seems to mean that none of these distant planet avoid centuries long storms. Makes ours look pale in comparison. I hadn’t realised that it was suspected that its moon, Triton, was thought to have been captured from the Kuiper Belt. That being the case, I would put it on the top of my wish list to have it further investigated because we’d learn a lot more about the Kuiper Belt there than sending a probe further out.
The last section of this book, ‘Other Bodies Of The Solar System’, covers everything else from the Sun to the lesser planets, like Pluto and Ceres and the Asteroid Belt, so nothing is neglected. Drawing a reference made to it must have been a planet or something of that size hitting Uranus that tipped it on its size and that Ceres is the more spherical of the Asteroid Belt does make me wonder if the entire debris was the source. I mean, something that big causing that much upset would have done even more damage passing deeper into the Solar system or broken up.
As ever, you can tell by the length of my reviews if a book has struck me. You might have seen some of these photos elsewhere but to have them all together under one cover less so. Be in awe. We are surrounded by the most unique places we are least likely to visit in our own lifetimes.
GF Willmetts
November 2017
(pub: Chronicle Books. 253 page illustrated square hardback. Price: £30.00 (UK), $40.00 (US). ISBN: 978-1-4521-5936-2)
check out website: www.chronicles.com