The Solar System by Robert Harvey is a beautiful book that also gives a great deal of information.

I have really come to love these coffee table books that use extensive captions rather than larger bodies of text with images cited in the text. Both types of books have their purpose, but for me, a book that I will have sitting out to entice people to flip through works better with large captions with each illustration.

Growing up in the 60s, I was like so many of my peers, imagining space travel and trying to learn what I could about space. While some of the fascination has been tempered over the years, it is still amazing to look at these pictures and see how much we have learned since those days. Even with several good astronomy and astrophysics courses under my belt, I still look at books like this with awe.

Remember those mobiles we did in elementary school with the planets around the sun? I think the teachers were mostly concerned with relative distances and relative sizes. Well, there are a couple of pages here that really struck me. One shows the planets mostly side-by-side to illustrate their relative sizes. Impressive, especially comparing Jupiter to Earth or Mercury. But turn the page and the planets are lined up against the sun to show relative sizes and even Jupiter is dwarfed. Talk about realizing just how small we are in the big picture!

I also got sidetracked with composite x-ray and ultraviolet images of the sun. They are both beautiful and teach us so much about this particular star, and by extension others. I went online and looked at even more such images. Well worth the time if you're so inclined.

Highly recommended as a coffee table book but also as a book to perhaps pique a young person's interest in astronomy and science in general.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )