Planetfall: New Solar System Visions

By Michael Benson

Book Overview

Thanks to the photographic output of a small squadron of interplanetary spacecraft, we have awakened to the beauty and splendor of the solar system. Since Michael Benson's masterful book Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes , new, more powerful cameras in probes with greatly improved maneuverability have traversed the wheeling satellites of Jupiter; roamed the boulder-strewn red deserts of Mars; studied Saturn's immaculate rings; and shown us our own ravishing Earth, a blue-white orb with a disturbingly thin atmosphere, as it plunges deeper into ecological crisis. These new images are the subject of Benson's Planetfall , a truly revelatory book that uses its large page size to reproduce the greatest achievements in contemporary planetary photography as never before. Praise for Planetfall : "All retrospectives, art and otherwise, should shock us awake the way this one does . . . Planetfall is a book of science through and through, but it also deepens our sense of the miracle and the mystery of the universe, of our eye-blink lives." -- The New York Times "This is the way I like to tour the solar system. Find a chair. Sit. Turn some pages. Gaze. Wonder." --NPR.com "Beautiful interplanetary images." --MSNBC.com "Beautiful visions of what's out there." -- The Huffington Post "To encounter a Benson landscape is to be in awe of not only how he sees the universe, but also the ways in which he composes the never-ending celestial ballet." --Time.com

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1419704222
• ISBN13: 9781419704222
• Release Date: October 2012
• Publisher: ABRAMS
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 4.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 15.3" x 12.3"