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    'Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle' by Michael Benson

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    Mayank Saini
    Michael Benson's book "Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle" features 228 photographs spanning from 450 light-years away to the earliest galaxies visible from the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago. The photos aim to give viewers a sense of their place in the vast universe and contemplate how images from billions of years ago represent real-time transmissions from the edge of time. While wrestling with complex spacetime concepts, readers are advised to simply appreciate the stunning astronomical images that showcase celestial objects like the Milky Way galaxy and distant colliding galaxies billions of light-years away.

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    'Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle' by Michael Benson

    Uploaded by

    Mayank Saini
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    Michael Benson's book "Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle" features 228 photographs spanning from 450 light-years away to the earliest galaxies visible from the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago. The photos aim to give viewers a sense of their place in the vast universe and contemplate how images from billions of years ago represent real-time transmissions from the edge of time. While wrestling with complex spacetime concepts, readers are advised to simply appreciate the stunning astronomical images that showcase celestial objects like the Milky Way galaxy and distant colliding galaxies billions of light-years away.

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    Michael Benson's book "Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle" features 228 photographs spanning from 450 light-years away to the earliest galaxies visible from the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago. The photos aim to give viewers a sense of their place in the vast universe and contemplate how images from billions of years ago represent real-time transmissions from the edge of time. While wrestling with complex spacetime concepts, readers are advised to simply appreciate the stunning astronomical images that showcase celestial objects like the Milky Way galaxy and distant colliding galaxies billions of light-years away.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    19 views1 page

    'Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle' by Michael Benson

    Uploaded by

    Mayank Saini
    Michael Benson's book "Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle" features 228 photographs spanning from 450 light-years away to the earliest galaxies visible from the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago. The photos aim to give viewers a sense of their place in the vast universe and contemplate how images from billions of years ago represent real-time transmissions from the edge of time. While wrestling with complex spacetime concepts, readers are advised to simply appreciate the stunning astronomical images that showcase celestial objects like the Milky Way galaxy and distant colliding galaxies billions of light-years away.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 1

    'Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle'

    by Michael Benson
    Staggering visions of deep space will give you a sense of our place in the universe.
    BOOK REVIEW
    February 28, 2010|By Sara Lippincott

    In attending to 2009’s spectacular financial crisis, you may not have noticed that it was also the Inter-
    national Year of Astronomy, commemorating the twin 400th anniversaries of Galileo’s first telescopic
    observations and the publication of “New Astronomy,” Kepler’s treatise on planetary motion.

    But Harry N. Abrams, the king of coffee-table books, took note, weighing in with a 5-pounder that
    would have flabbergasted those two savants. Journalist and filmmaker Michael Benson, author of
    “Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes” (also published by Abrams), has moved farther -- a lot
    farther -- into deep space in “Far Out,” amassing and musing on a collection of 228 spectacular “astro-
    photographs” that reach all the way back to a few million years after the big bang. The earliest galaxies in
    the Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field appear as little more than tiny reddish smears, but their
    light is 13 billion years old. Contemplating them gives you some notion of who you are and what you
    represent.

    “It’s worth considering that what we’re seeing when we observe those earliest galaxies is a real-time
    transmission from time’s edge,” the space-and-time-besotted Benson writes in his introduction, which
    will make your head spin. The images run from front to back (or west to east, as Benson oddly puts it) in
    order of their distance from Earth -- that is, from a mere 450 light-years away to the big bang neighbor-
    hood. You can leaf through “Far Out” in either direction, Benson advises: “If you start from its nominal
    beginning . . . and work your way east, you’ll initially find yourself within a typical ancient barred spiral
    galaxy -- the Milky Way, circa 13 billion years old -- and progress to spaces deeper and times past. If you
    start from its eastern end and work your way west, you’ll begin among the earliest galaxies . . . and end
    up in the distant future -- about 13 billion years later, within the contemporaneous cosmos. At the end,
    in other words, is the beginning, and at the beginning the end -- our local, ongoing end -- that is, the
    business end of time’s arrow.” Got it?

    While you’re wrestling with the idea that something can be both newly formed and 13 billion years old,
    and both there and (possibly) not there simultaneously (whatever that word might mean), it’s best just
    to look at the pictures, which are truly stunning. They include a four-page spread, 1foot by 3 1/2 feet
    unfolded, depicting the Milky Way as seen from our location on its Orion spur; the Eskimo nebula, “a
    distant face in a fur-lined parka hood”; the Tarantula nebula, 1,000 light-years across and fortunately
    about 160,000 light-years away; and four galaxies, 210 million to 340 million light-years away, on colli-
    sion course with one another. Welcome to the real world.

    Lippincott is a freelance editor specializing in science.

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