Preface: The Long and the Short of It.- Part One: Our Place in the Cosmos.- Chapter One: Asteroids, Comets, and Our Cosmic Landscape.- Chapter Two: Ice Dwarfs and Tiny Moons.- Chapter Three: The Weirdest Moons, Large and Small.- Chapter Four: A Tour of the Planets.- Chapter Five: Bright, Shining Stars.- Chapter Six: Nebulae, Galaxies, and the Edge of All Things.- Chapter Seven: Understanding Scale in the Universe.- Part Two: Our Place in Time.- Chapter Eight: The Worlds Around Us.- Chapter Nine: Space Travel.- Index.

Astronomical concepts can be truly hard to comprehend, especially those of planetary sizes and distances from Earth and from each other. These concepts are made more comprehensible by the group of illustrations in this book, which put scale extraterrestrial objects side by side with objects on Earth we can more easily relate to. For example, study the pictures of Earth floating above Jupiter's Great Red Spot and the asteroid Itokawa resting beside Toronto's CN Tower. These mind-bending images bring things better into perspective and will help you understand the size and scale of our Solar System.

In later chapters, you will be told how close the visionaries of the past came to guessing what today's explorers would find. Astronomer/painter Lucien Rudaux's masterpieces of Mars dust storms anticipated Viking and Mars rover images by nearly a century. Space artist Ludek Pesek envisioned astronauts setting up camp on the lunar surface in scenes hauntingly similar to photos taken by Apollo astronauts decades later. But the real benefit of this work is in better grasping the nature of our universe -- how big it is, now large it is, and how we fit into it.

Michael Carroll is a space artist and science writer. He has done commissioned work for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His art has appeared in several hundred magazines throughout the world, including National Geographic, Time, Asimov's Science Fiction, Smithsonian, Astronomy, and others. One of his paintings was flown aboard Russia's MIR space station in 1995. Recent murals include the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Fleet Science Center in San Diego, and Lockheed/Martin. Carroll is a Fellow of the International Association for the Astronomical Arts and has written articles and books on topics ranging from space to dinosaurs to biblical archaeology. His articles have appeared in Popular Science, Astronomy, Astronomy Now (UK), Sky & Telescope, and a host of children's magazines. In 2007, he was awarded the Lucien Rudaux Award for lifetime contribution to the astronomical arts. Carroll has authored three books already for Springer, entitled "The Seventh Landing" (2009), "Drifting in Alien Skies (2011)" and "Alien Seas" (2013).