I have been in love with the Universe since I was a kid. Astronomy has always been my passion, and eventually became my career. This drove me to get my astronomy PhD and work on Hubble for a decade before starting to write and do public outreach about science. I’ve been on podcasts, radio, TV, and consulted for books and blockbuster sci-fi movies. I love science and science fiction – stories are one of the most powerful ways we relate to the Universe. I live and breathe this stuff every day, and my greatest joy is motivating that passion for science in others.
I wrote
Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer's Guide to the Universe
If you’ve seen the movie it’s time to read the book.
The Martian gets a lot of the science right as an astronaut stuck on Mars tries to get home using whatever technology he has on hand to survive. The descriptions of the planet are really good, giving you a feel for what it would be like to live on the Red Planet.
Weir does take a science shortcut or two to advance the plot, but the overall story is so gripping I’m OK with it.
Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars.
Now, he's sure he'll be the first person to die there.
After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he's alive--and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive.
Chances are, though, he won't have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old human error are…
These books launched one of the best sci-fi TV shows of all time, and are fantastically written space opera.
Humans have expanded into space, living on the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids. We’re on the edge of war, political hardliners aren’t helping… and then a weird, mysterious substance makes things much, much worse.
The science in these books is spot-on, and the storytelling completely absorbing while spanning an epic scale.
Humanity has colonized the planets - interstellar travel is still beyond our reach, but the solar system has become a dense network of colonies. But there are tensions - the mineral-rich outer planets resent their dependence on Earth and Mars and the political and military clout they wield over the Belt and beyond. Now, when Captain Jim Holden's ice miner stumbles across a derelict, abandoned ship, he uncovers a secret that threatens to throw the entire system into war. Attacked by a stealth ship belonging to the Mars fleet, Holden must find a way to uncover the motives behind the…
This is, hands down, the single best book about the Apollo Moon missions ever written.
Comprehensive, accurate, and utterly engrossing, Chaikin takes you back to the 1960s and 70s and to the Moon to tell the story about how humans visited their first alien world.
Far and away my favorite book on the topic — and as we begin the journey to go back to the Moon, a great time to read up on when we did it first.
This is the definitive account of the heroic Apollo programme.
When astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their 'giant leap for mankind' across a ghostly lunar landscape, they were watched by some 600 million people on Earth 240,000 miles away.
Drawing on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with the astronauts and mission personnel, this is the story of the twentieth century's greatest human achievement, minute-by-minute, through the eyes of those who were there.
From the tragedy of the fire in Apollo 1 during a simulated launch, Apollo 8's bold pioneering flight around the…
Astronomer Mike Brown is dedicated to finding small icy worlds beyond Neptune.
His discovery of the frozen object Eris in 2005—only slightly smaller but more massive than Pluto—is credited for kick-starting the official debate of how we define a planet, and this book is his personal telling of that story.
He weaves it together with the birth of his daughter in a well-told and engaging tale that will give you insight on how discoveries can change how we see the Universe.
The solar system most of us grew up with included nine planets, with Mercury closest to the sun and Pluto at the outer edge. Then, in 2005, astronomer Mike Brown made the discovery of a lifetime: a tenth planet, Eris, slightly bigger than Pluto. But instead of its resulting in one more planet being added to our solar system, Brown’s find ignited a firestorm of controversy that riled the usually sedate world of astronomy and launched him into the public eye. The debate culminated in the demotion of Pluto from real planet to the newly coined category of “dwarf” planet.…
Carl Sagan is still one of the most well-known astronomers, renowned for his ability to create wonder and awe in his descriptions of the Universe.
In this book, he’s at his finest form, a science fiction tale of the discovery of an intelligent alien signal coming from space, and how the world reacts to it. It’s a wonderful treatise on religion, science, belief, and evidence.
If you’ve seen the movie, read the book: It’s far superior, and the very last page will give you chills and leave you questioning what you think reality is.
Under Alien Skiesis the ultimate sightseer’s guide to the Universe, a tour book like no other that takes you to alien worlds and shows you what it’s like to actually be there.Experience a binary star sunset like Luke did in Star Wars, watch as a million stars come out at night in a cluster, and fly through a star-forming nebula, all described by a professional astronomer and all scientifically accurate based on our understanding of the Universe today.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
