The Hubble Space Telescope is the largest, most complex, and most powerful telescope ever flown in space. Because of Hubble, scientists have acquired a new and vivid understanding of the universe as a realm of breathtaking beauty and epic violence. In Postcards from Outer Space, Dana Berry shares the Hubble’s fabulous revelations with a wider readership. These pages show primordial galaxies at their moment of creation. They illustrate the life cycle of stars, from improbable birth to fiery, furious death. They trace massive comets on a collision course with Jupiter and all-engulfing dust storms that swirl over Mars. They take the reader to icy planetary bodies newly discovered along the far horizon of our solar system and beyond them, at the very edge of the cosmic abyss, to witness the splash and swirl of far-distant galaxies as they rip one another apart. These images have given astronomers the key to unlocking many cosmic mysteries and yet there has never been a book that fully explained its stunning achievements. Postcards from Outer Space provides for the first time a comprehensive portrait of the universe.

DANA BERRY was a founder of the Astronomy Visualization Lab at the Space Telescope Science Institute and has worked for NASA and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics. He is the author of The Smithsonian Intimate Guide to the Cosmos and Race to Mars.