I have worked in an astronomy museum for six years, and this book has me pausing to try and comprehend what the book is trying to do. I am not familiar with the other Janice VanCleave books, but I specifically recommend AGAINST this one.
People have followed Mercury's path through twilit skies since ancient times,but only since Mariner 10 flew by in 1974 have we begun to unravel themysteries of the sun's closest neighbor. Impressive NASA photographs willtake you to a cratered world where days hot enough to melt lead and nightsat 300 degrees below zero last for almost three months.
From rocketing out of Earth's gravity and orbiting our planet to probing other planets and walking on the Moon, Cosmic Science makes exploring space a blast! More than 40 easy, safe—and fun—activities show how rockets work, why the shape of the Moon seems to change, just how much power the Sun has, what it's like to live and work in space, and much more!
The sky is not the limit! If you yearn to touch the stars, 101 Outer Space Projects for the Evil Genius has everything you need to explore the universe from the comfort of your own home. Whether you're a beginner stargazer or a more experienced astronomer, you'll find an outstanding project to satisfy you, from model rockets and celestial maps to space robots, GPS systems, and much, much more.
Full of easy-to-follow plans and clear schematics for each project, as well as lists of materials and tools so you know exactly what's involved before you begin, 101 Outer Space Projects for the Evil Genius
Frustration-factor removal-needed parts are listed, along with sources
101 Outer Space Projects for the Evil Genius provides you with all the plans, instructions, parts lists, and sources you need to:
- Use GPS systems
- Experiment with model rockets
- Navigate your way through the universe using your computer
- Build your own telescope, radio telescope, and planetarium
- Read celestial maps of heavenly bodies
- Create a Mars rover to explore your home
- Design your own International Space Station
Book Description
In this illuminating activity book, kids delve into the rich history of space exploration, where telescopes, satellites, probes, landers, and human missions lead to amazing discoveries. Tracking astronomers' recent progress—including the discovery of 2003 UB313, what some are calling the tenth planet in the solar system—kids explore the planets and other celestial bodies for themselves through activities such as "walking" from the sun to Pluto or creating their own reentry vehicle to safely return an egg to Earth's surface. With biographies of more than 20 space pioneers, specific mission details, a 20-page field guide to the solar system, and plenty of suggestions for further research, this is the ultimate guidebook to exploring the solar system.
Customer Reviews:
Solar System Book-Space Info.......2006-08-19
I bought this for my 6 yr. daughter. She's very interested in Space. It's a good quality book (no cheap paper). It has a lot of information from the past. First attempt into space they sent a dog. My daughter is very smart and understands what she is reading (or what I help her read). I would say it's more for 8 yrs and up (but perfect for a younger mature child). It has original pictures (not cartoon drawings) and is very educational for the whole family (if you are interested in learning about space). I recommend it for your collection.
An awesome choice for our star-crazy young ones!.......2006-04-01
In true Mary Kay Carson fashion, Exploring the Solar System : A History with 22 Activities isn't dumbed down even the slightest. Carson respects children and seems to grasp well what they can be expected to understand - which is often more than what they are credited with. As a result, her text is thorough and frank and can easily be read to would-be astronauts as young as 4 or 5 years. And the illustrative photos are stunning, the perfect foil for the text in capturing the imagination. From interviews with well-regarded scientists (including explanations of how they themselves became interested in studying space) to easy-to-execute activities to a very thorough timeline of space exploration, Carson has once again thought of everything for engaging our own little scientists. I simply cannot recommend this book enough.
Amazon.com
As many earthlings already know--including more than 2 million computer users with firsthand experience--our best hope for finding extraterrestrial intelligence might just lie with an ingenious little screensaver. So it's not surprising that this introduction to searching for and communicating with intelligent life begins with some of the details behind UC Berkeley's groundbreaking, massively distributed SETI@home project, which processes intergalactic noise for pennies on the teraflop. But that's just the start of the story. Inventor and software developer Brian McConnell continues with an overview of whether and why we might find something out there, who's doing what to look for it (including the folks at Berkeley), and--once some ET picks up on the other end--what we might say and how we might say it.
This last problem, which occupies the final half of the book, proves to be the most thought-provoking, and McConnell has put together a methodical, nuts-and-bolts walkthrough of both the challenges involved and how binary code might be enlisted to solve them. If you've taken even a single computer-science class in your life, you'll probably skip ahead through explanations of data structures and Boolean arithmetic, but McConnell doesn't want to leave anyone behind in fleshing out his alien-friendly lingua numerica. The book's first half surveys various SETI projects, past and present, and includes generous sections on signal processing, what sort of radio and laser hardware has been mobilized for the search, and how exactly SETI@home works. (So, if nothing else, now you can know how your computer decides if it's talking to aliens while you're off having lunch.) --Paul Hughes
Book Description
"What do we need to know about to discover life in space?" --Frank Drake, 1961 In the early 1960s, Frank Drake, a young astronomer with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia, developed what is now known as the "Drake Equation" in an effort to determine how many intelligent, communicative civilizations our galaxy could harbor. For forty years, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has combed the skies in search of signals from star systems within the galaxy. In Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations, author Brian McConnell goes behind the scenes and examines what goes into the search for intelligent life. SETI is a four-step process. First we have to know where to look; then we must be able to send and receive signals to that star system. Once signals arrive, scientists then need to be able to interpret those signals into something that can be understood. And although we haven't yet received any signals (except for our own Earth-based transmissions), we'll eventually have to figure out a protocol for responding. Beyond Contact introduces you to:
- The history of SETI research, including the early searches of Project Ozma, traditional radio astronomy, the search for intelligence in optical wavelengths (known as Optical SETI, or OSETI), and the SETI@home project.
- An overview of the Drake Equation and the Rare Earth Hypothesis, which scientists use to estimate the number of planets in our galaxy that could harbor intelligent, communicative life forms.
- How signals are sent and received over interstellar distances. The author explains the principles of signal and image processing, and how SETI researchers identify and process analog signals using Fourier transforms to see how the power in a signal is distributed across different frequencies.
- How to build a general-purpose symbolic language for sending signals, and even computer programs, with present-day SETI equipment. The ability to transmit computer programs enables us to let another civilization know about our knowledge and technological capabilities.
The author also shows how SETI research--though often thought to be a mere flight of fancy--has spawned technological improvements in astronomy, computers, and wireless communications. Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations sidesteps the "little green men" approach to take a hard, realistic look at the technologies behind the search for intelligent life in our universe.
Customer Reviews:
Awesome!.......2007-07-12
This is the kind of book you need to understand the details of SETI, how does it work, what its limitations would be, and what technology is behind. It is an excellent addition to your personal library if you are a tech-savy and enjoy learning about science and technology.
Get's down to the skinny when it comes to communicating with aliens.......2007-06-20
This is a very all-encompassing book about extraterrestrial communication, and goes to considerable length explaining how it would be done through binary language. It is a very intelligent book about life on other planets, The Drake Equation, etc. People need to know what they're getting into if they buy this book - it really is for those who have a more technical/scientific bent towards the whole SETI process. If you think Speilberg's ET or Sagan's Contact are the bees knees when it comes to intellectual sci-fi, then this book is definitely not for you. I should point out that there is a direct correlation between a person's IQ and how high a score they give this excellent tome.
can't take it seriously.......2002-04-15
Here's a book that superficially looks like a serious technical discussion of SETI, even to the point where many potential readers may be intimidated by the diagrams, equations, jargon, and so on. But in reality, it's very lacking in solid scientific information.
For example: On page 116, one of the factors mentioned as a limit to OSETI (finding laser beacons and such) is extinction--the attenuation of light due to dust in the intersteller medium. This, it is said, limits our ability to see laser beacons to "a few dozens light years" for visible wavelengths. Really?? Then how come you can go and see stars farther away than that with your naked eye? Oh, because they're brighter! Well, how bright does a laser beacon need to be? How much attentuation is there, in per cent, dB or whatever, at, say, 100 light years? How much does a beam spread out over, say, 100 light years? How much variation in the signal is there over time as a result of dust? Not a BIT of quantitative data on this stuff!
Like all other SETI enthusiasts I've seen, they also ignore another issue: As communication techniques get more advanced, they look more and more like random noise. Our millions of chattering cell phones and internet hosts will almost certainly be undetectable to anyone outside the earth environment, let alone the solar system: Those transmissions have no directionality, they are low power precisely because they are efficient and advanced, and their advanced modulation causes them to look like white noise. Consider a 300 bps modem, with its old-fashioned tone signaling; then listen to a 56k modem, which, except when it's hooking up, sounds almost like rushing steam. It's hard to escape the idea that we will only pick up radio from ET if he intentionally beams it at us, a doubtful proposition unless he's within 60 light years, as he has no way to know of OUR radio transmissions.
A final word about copy editing: I've yet to read a book with absolutely no errors, but at least they could get three-letter words like "its" right. There are other serious errors, such as missing words, the ubiquitous "different than," and other less glaring mistakes. If they can't do better than that, perhaps they should just record audio tapes.
All in all, about a third of the way through, I decided that other books must surely be able to better satisfy my curiosity on this subject.
A decent review of the basics, but more than a little dry.......2002-03-13
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I like the idea of this book, but the execution left a bit to be desired.
The first two sections ("Are We Alone?" and "Getting a Dial Tone") do a passably good job of introducing some of the basics of interstellar communication, ably introducing both the fundamentals of radio and optical technologies and the unique challenges of communicating a signal (any signal; the details of the signal to be sent are reserved for Part III) across interstellar distances.
Problems with the first two sections are:
(1) inconsistent readability: the author seems not to have found a consistent tone for the book, and wanders between wide-eyed pie-in-the-sky speculation and bone-dry technical detail;
(2) organizational flaws: the author routinely discusses a concept or entity throughout early chapters without a decent introduction or explanation, only to treat the subject in question at length (with the proper explanatory introduction) later in the text -- the discussion of the SETI@home distributed computing project is particularly guilty of this;
(3) lack of investigative reporting: almost every piece of information in these sections could have come out of a textbook or a web search, and it's clear that the author hasn't bothered to interview the movers and shakers in the SETI community and find out anything much about the "story behind the story," which might have made for some interesting reading;
(4) bad editing: there is a typo every few pages, which is a minor beef but in the age of spell-checkers hardly excusable.
Nonetheless, if you've never read a "Scientific American" article about SETI, the first two sections of the book would be educational. If you have any exposure to SETI prior to picking up the book, chances are that you won't learn very much (except possibly about optical SETI/CETI, which relies on the production and/or detection of laser light aimed at a specific star system, and which is grossly undertreated in the literature).
The third section ("Communicating with Other Worlds") treats the specifics of the author's ideas about what sort of message could be sent by us (or, by extension, might be received by us from others). The author makes an analogy between modular messages encoded in binary code and genes encoded by DNA, and sets up one potential system that might be used to send a complex message from star A to star B. This section is definitely the weakest in the book, for the following reasons.
(1) It treats at punishingly great length only one possible system of a presumably great many for communicating with alien intelligences, glossing over other approaches in favor of a detailed treatment of the author's pet approach. While I don't have a specific complaint with the approach described, I will say that as a working biologist, I found the author's biologically motivated analogies ("igenes," "binary DNA") strained and in some cases laughable. It probably makes the material "sexier" in the computer-science and SETI literature, but as a life scientist I mostly winced a lot.
(2) In part because of this, the author doesn't put his approach in any kind of context -- e.g., how else might we do it?
(3) It's way too long and inappropriately detailed: a great deal of theory of computation stuff that's not at all unique to SETI or the challenge of communicating with a non-human intelligence ends up in this section, and I don't think that benefits the reader more than just saying, "We'll send computer programs using the benefit of knowledge reaped from the maturing fields of cryptography and computer science and our impressive knowledge of the physical universe," and focusing more on reasons why any approach like this has shortcomings and might not work regardless of how clever you are.
All that having been said, this is an OK book. I wouldn't recommend that it be the only thing that you read about SETI, nor would I recommend that you read it cover-to-cover (unless you have troubles with insomnia), but if you're an avid reader of the SETI literature, it certainly can't hurt to pick this one up.
A highly technical book on interstellar communication.......2002-01-15
Readers who want a general introduction to questions related to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence should look elsewhere. This is a highly technical book on the techniques and problems of communication across interstellar distances. People with strong backgrounds in science or engineering may find this material fascinating, but general readers soon will get lost. Overall rating (for techies): four stars.
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I wish I hadn't bought this..........2007-01-18
