| View Larger Image | Postcards from Mars: The First Photographer on the Red Planet | Hardcoverby Jim Bell (Author)
| List Price: | $50.00 | |
| | Binding: | Hardcover | | Publisher: | Dutton Adult | | Page Count: | 208 Pages | | Publication Date: | November 16, 2006 | | Sales Rank: | 176,689th |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
The first photographic tour of the surface of another planet has now been accomplished. Those who thrilled to the lunar beauty of Full Moon and the IMAX smash Roving Mars will marvel at this awesome, vivid, beautiful portrait of what it is like to take a stroll on Mars. The most fantastic of all journeys—the Spirit and Opportunity mobile robot missions to the surface of Mars—produced over 150,000 astonishing photographs. While the images were made available on low-resolution computer screens as they were sent back across millions of space miles, no one until now has done the painstaking work of editing, cropping, and processing these massive (often larger than 100 megabytes) images. The person to do it is Jim Bell, the scientist and photographer who led the photography team on this historic expedition. With his unique perspective, these photographs take us from the brave launches of these robots, to the alien landscape they discovered and the mysteries of the planet that they have helped to solve. Over 150 lavish full-color-process prints bring the colors and textures of Mars to vivid life on the page. Four of the most impressive pictures are presented in their entirety as gatefold images— which extend over three feet in width—providing a view of the surface of another planet unprecedented in its detail and clarity. Postcards from Mars is the perfect gift to give readers who have their feet on the ground and their eyes on the heavens. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 27 reviews)
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Mars landscape at its best by Thomas Erickson  5 Stars
November 16, 2009
Fantastic book. Its a large book This book is eye candy for this amateur astronomer. So rich with excellent landscape scenes and good explaining what you see.The author and illustrator did it right. A must for anyone interested in Mars or who loves Astronomy. This is not a kids book but no difficult math.So well illustrated young chhildren will love it with parents reading it to them.If you have an interest in Mars this book will get you ramped up to learn more.
Mars has Olympic Mars the largest volcano in the solar system. Many times the height of Mt Everest. Mars has a huge canyon that dwarfs the Grand Canyon. You could put the Rocky Mts in the Canyon easily and you wouldnt even see it. Plus 2 ice caps and many hundreds more intersting sites.Now scientific evidence there once was lots of water on Mars and Mars had a thicker atmosphere.Where there is water there may have been some form of LIFE.
Parente can show their kids the pictures and read the explainations.Both will love this book. Then let your child see Mars in a telescope right after seeing the pictures and you reading the explainations. Every 2 years because of Mars large ellipical orbit, Mars gets close enough to Earth for good viewing with backyard telescopes. January it will be close.
Maybe in 30 years or less a man or women will set foot on Mars and see this fantastic scenery. I hope so. Until then this book is a must look and read. Maybe a young person will have the Mars spark from the great pictures in this book and readings and be the first to set foot on Mars.
Buy two books. One for your home library and one as a coffee table book. When someone comes over and sees the book and starts looking at the pictures and readings you can take your copy out and explore Mars together.
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Great book but delivered too late to give it as a gift! by P. Chamandy (Ithaca, NY)  1 Stars
September 10, 2009
I intended to give the book to my Nephew who was visiting from India but although I ordered it with plenty of time, it wasn't delivered in a timely manner and now it would cost me more than the book costs to send it to him.
It was no deal and I should have bought it at retail. Be careful with the false promises regarding delivery from this website
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Amazing photos, very good words, too. by Archimedes (Seattle) 5 Stars
March 24, 2008
I expected the photos to be great, but I was surprised to find the accompanying writings (by a project scientist) to be so interesting and informative.
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Photos from Mars are extraordinary! by Lee LaFarge (West Virginia) 5 Stars
March 20, 2008
This book is wonderful! I can't really add anything to what others have said. I just hope we get a second edition of additional photos when the two rovers have completed their epic adventures. When I was growing up in the 50s, the planets were just fuzzy blobs in the best telescopic photos. I'm glad I've lived to see these extraordinary "postcards."
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Feels Like You're There by David Ogilvie  4 Stars
January 27, 2008
Postcards From Mars is the definitive coffee table book of images from the two rovers which landed on Mars in 2004. Jim Bell goes through all the stages of the missions, from conception, spacecraft assembly, their launch and cruise to Mars, landings, and their adventures and discoveries on the planet. He does this in layman's terms and from the perspective of someone who was working on the missions. These missions are still continuing today in 2008, and he should write another edition when the missions are completed.
But the real stars of the book are the many images of the Martian surface taken by the rovers. These are shown to (almost) full advantage in this large-format book with many gatefold panoramas. (A few of the pictures are printed rather dark.) The one thing lacking is in the captions of the images. Only a few words are said about each image.--These historic images deserve to have more said about them. You can find many of these same images on the various NASA websites, and they certainly have more detailed captions there. Also, the captions in this book are very small and hard to read. The brief captions are the only reason why I give this book four stars instead of five.
A good companion to this book is The Martian Landscape, another large-format book, this one filled with images from the two Viking Landers which landed on Mars in 1976. The captions in this book go into exhaustive detail.
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