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, which well describes this new edition of a 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 the latest discoveries made by Galileo, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Mars Global Surveyor Mission, the Mars rovers and other space inititiatives, The Grand Tour is a dazzling journey that combines lush art and up-to-the-minute science. One hundred and forty new paintings---as well as scores of photographs---give travelers an unprecedented view of phenomena such as Saturn’s rings seen from Saturn itself; the rusty-red dune fields of Mars; the rugged surface of Mercury, saturated with impact craters; the erupting volcanoes of Io, and the Kuiper Belt of planetesimals, the largest of which is Pluto. From the vast reaches of Jupiter to tiny, frozen Quahor, it is a journey of astonishing proportions.
More than 227,000 copies in print.
Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Quality Paperback Book Club, McGraw-Hill Book Club and Newbridge Book Club
Ron Miller is an illustrator known for his astronomical and science fiction paintings. He has created artwork for motion pictures and postage stamps and is the author of numerous novels and non-fiction books. He is a Fellow of the International Association of Astronomical Artists, a winner of the Hugo Award and Award of Excellence from the American Institute of Physics. He lives in King George, Virginia.
William K. Hartmann is the author, most recently, of A Traveler's Guide to Mars, as well as numerous textbooks and novels. He is an internationally known scientist, writer, and painter, and winner of the first Carl Sagan Medal from the American Astronomical Society. He has an asteroid-#3341-named after him. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
