The Grand Tour - Softcover

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 the word grand. Introducing the new edition of the book praised as "spectacular" by "The Times". The colourful and imaginative paintings steal the show page after page. "The Grand Tour", an astronomy classic, takes readers on an imaginative trip through every corner of the Solar System, in much the same way as Cook once took travellers on a grand tour of the Continent. Completely updated and revised and drawing on discoveries made by Voyager I and II, Magellan, Galileo, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Mars Global Surveyor Mission and other space initiatives, "The Grand Tour" is a dazzling journey that combines lush art and up to the minute science. 100 new paintings give travellers an unprecedented view of phenomena such as Saturn's rings from Saturn itself. It includes the rusty red dune fields of Mars; the rugged surface of Mercury, saturated with impact craters; and the Kuiper Belt of planetesimals, the largest of which is Pluto - now considered a half-planet. From the vast reaches of Jupiter to tiny frozen Rhea, like a snowball orbiting around Saturn, it is a journey of astonishing proportions.