Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Books and Gifts for Space Kids of all Ages

Episode Date: November 20, 2019

Our own Emily Lakdawalla, Planetary Society senior editor and book lover, shares her 2019 list of space books for everyone, from infant to adult. She also presents a list of cool space gifts recommended by scientists and engineers. Bruce Betts provides a tantalizing tease for what could be a brief but massive shower of meteors. And there’s much more to look for in the fall sky. You’ll find links to the complete lists of Emily’s recommended space books and gifts at: https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/1120-2019-lakdawalla-books.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Need a great space book? Emily has the list, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. It's that time of year, Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla is back with her annual list of outstanding books for space nerds of all ages. She'll join me in moments to list just a few of her faves, and she'll read a few passages. You'll also hear my top picks, and we'll sample Emily's separate list of great gifts recommended by space professionals. Bruce Betts is also ahead on this home team edition of our show. Here are three stories torn from the latest edition of The Downlink, the Planetary Society's weekly digest of space exploration and science headlines.

Planetary Society Editorial Director Jason Davis has more waiting for you at planetary.org slash downlink. Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft left asteroid Ryugu after spending nearly a year and a half collecting samples, creating an artificial crater, and deploying small probes. The spacecraft will return its two samples of Ryugu to Earth in about a year. They might tell us more about the origin and evolution of the solar system. Ultima Thule no more. That wondrous Kuiper Belt object, officially known till now as 2014 MU69, has been given the name Arrokoth by the International

Astronomical Union. The Native American term means sky in the Pauhata Algonquian language. The New Horizons spacecraft famously flew past it on New Year's Day 2019. Ultima Thule was never more than a nickname provided by the mission team. NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has detected seasonal changes in oxygen levels that scientists can't explain. The findings may be related to a similar ongoing mystery over fluctuating methane levels. There's a chance the changes could be linked to underground life, though a non-biological explanation is more likely. Need we remind you that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? Of course, I believe it's a grove of giant sequoias in the Valles Marineris, with squirrels. Kidding. The

downlink has lots of links waiting for all of you who want to explore these and other stories. No kidding. Going now to our friend and colleague, Emily Lakdawalla. I'll remind you again later, but all the books she recommends on her 2019 list can be found in the blog at planetary.org, along with the gift guide. Emily, like you, books have meant, right from the beginning and still today, mean so much to me. I remember, in fact, I still have the life science library that my parents bought us, and my favorite volume in that library, the book simply called Space, which gave me a good deal of my introduction to astronomy and astronautics and space exploration. And then science fiction as well, not something that you cover, except for the, I guess, the youngest kids. There's a little bit of fiction here, but still have some old Robert Heinlein young adult books here. Books are that important

to you too, aren't they? Yeah, I've been a huge reader all my life. So it was a little difficult when I had children and it didn't have as much time as I used to, to just get lost in books. Like you say, fantasy, sci-fi, nonfiction, I used to devour everything. I remember a book that changed my life was The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert Baker, which I read as an eighth grader, which had the gall to question established science and propose this revolutionary idea that dinosaurs might actually be birds. And it's just been delightful to watch that whole thing unfold. So books are very important to me. And, you know, when I became a parent, I wasn't reading so many books intended for adults, but I about space, kind of dovetailed both of my interests being a parent and, of course, space exploration. The delightful thing about that is

that after doing this for now 11 years, I get shipped boxes and boxes of books all year long. And it's like Christmas every day, I get one of these, I get to open it up and see what's inside. Great fun. As you know, I get some of these as well, but they tend to be intended for adults. I had the best time. Some of my best parental memories are of reading to my daughters, who I am delighted to say are both avid readers now and very fine writers. And I'm sure that that was very much tied to their exposure to books as young kids. writers. And I'm sure that that was very much tied to their exposure to books as young kids. Oh, definitely. My kids are, of course, avid readers too. And it was really important to me that I read books to them that weren't just informative and had good story, but the language

had to be enjoyable as well. The word choice is rich, the rhythm of the sentences, fun to read aloud. And so I always look for that in the books that I recommend in my annual book list. Well, so I don't think that we've ever thrown away a children's book because Adrian was planning for grandchildren right from the start. And so we have shelves downstairs. You have on this newest list a bunch of books that probably belong on some of those shelves. Let's start going through some of these. And I know you've got them divided up by age range. Yes. When I recommend books for kids, I'm not kidding. I recommend books for all ages, zero to 18. And so to help people out in selecting books for their own kids or their nibblings or whoever, I do divide them by age. It's funny, different years I get more or less of different age range books. This year was a particularly good year for books for ages around four to seven, the kind that you read aloud to a

child who's just beginning to learn to read for themselves. There were some great ones this year. Okay. And you start even younger than that, as you said, zero to, what is it? Zero to three? Even infants. Get them while they're young. I have to say some of the books in that category are really more for the parents than they are for the children, but they're good, durable board books. But let's begin, I think, with a book from this four to seven-year-old range. The first one I'd like to talk about is Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, I Know Exactly What You Are, which was written by Dr. Julia Cregano, who's actually an astronomer

at Penn State, illustrated by Carmen Saldana. And this, as you might imagine, it's a retelling, a rephrasing of the Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star poem. But Cregano has actually managed to compress into that rhyme a huge amount of information about different kinds of stars across the galaxy. And I'd like to read a little selection of it if I could. Please do. So this is toward the middle of the book. Our sun's average as stars go formed 5 billion years ago. Halfway through its life so far, twinkle midsize yellow star. That's wonderful. What a perfect little selection.

Oh, there's more. There's more. I want to read a couple of stanzas. Two stars make a binary or a triple if there's three. Some are solo just like ours. Twinkle, twinkle, little stars. Quarter trillion stars all stay bound within the Milky Way. Dusty spiral with a bar.

Twinkle galaxy of stars. Stars have planets orbiting rocky or gaseous moons and rings. Earth's unique with life so far. Thank you to our precious star. Oh, that was lovely. Thank you. I think that's one for my going on four-year-old grandson. It's so enjoyable to read because she's really, like I said, packed a lot of information.

Each page has a wonderful illustration with it. Each has some facts that will really teach parents about stars. And yet it still has the proper rhythm and is hugely enjoyable to read. For adults, too. I mean, that's just fun to listen to and to read. Absolutely. And those are the kinds of books that I really love and pull off the shelf again and again. All right. Any others for this age group or do we move on?

Yeah, I had one other I wanted to recommend from this one. It's not in verse. It's just a prose story written by Dean Robbins, illustrated by Sean Rubin. It's called The Astronaut Who Painted the Moon. And it's about Alan Bean, the Apollo astronaut who became a space artist after he returned to Earth. Robbins talked with Bean doing research for this. And so it's a very special story. It's about the Apollo mission, but it's really more about space art and how Bean wanted to use art to communicate about the wonder of exploring the moon with the rest of the public. And of course, we only just celebrated Alan Bean with the marking of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 12. And I'd like to read a selection from this one too, if I could. Sure. Alan's friends asked

him about his time in space. What was it like up there? He tried to explain the moon's barren beauty, but words weren't enough, and his photographs just showed a grim and gloomy place. There was so much more to the moon than that, so much magic and mystery. How could Alan share his story so others would understand? He pulled out his paints and brushes. Alan knew he was the only artist ever to leave the Earth, the only artist ever to see the moon up close. Maybe a painting could show how it felt to be in outer space. And of course, since then, we've had a number of other artists follow Alan being in the space. And it's just, it's wonderful to think about not just the visual artists,

but the musicians and others who've made it up to the International Space Station and elsewhere above our heads. Does this book contain any of Alan Bean's actual work? It does not. It contains really wonderful illustrations by Sean Rubin, but it doesn't contain Alan Bean's art. art. It does, I think, inspire parents who are pretty much all hyper-connected to the internet these days to maybe Google and look for his really very unusual artworks. And the book does talk about how his art is not representational, it's abstract, and it's about communicating the feeling of being on the moon, the kind of human experience of it, as much as it is about showing what the moon looked like to his eyes. But I've always enjoyed his,

his work as well. And I'm looking at the cover of the book and it's a great illustration by this Sean Rubin. And I should mention that Dean Robbins wrote one of the books that I recommended last year, which is called Margaret in the moon about Margaret Hamilton. So he's clearly a space fan and I look forward to more from him. Nice.

Yeah. Return visit. That's great. Okay. Let's move on. Moving up a little bit, we're going up in age to maybe older elementary school, to kids who are reading chapter books, easy chapter books. And so they're looking for short, maybe exciting books with great illustrations. And I have an unusual one to recommend this time around.

I'm always a little fearful when I'm contacted by somebody who self-publishes a book. It's not because people can't write well if they aren't part of the writing establishment, but often they try to publish their books without having any professional editing done. And that, I'll tell you, is a huge mistake. Editors save lives. And so when I'm contacted by amateur authors or people who are doing the self-publishing route, I always tell them, you have to understand, first of all, I don't recommend you send a book to me that hasn't been edited by somebody who has some skill.

And second of all, I almost never recommend self-published books because they just don't meet that editorial quality. But this one really favorably surprised me. It's written by a software engineer named Douglas Meredith, titled Generation Mars, illustrated by Luis Perez. It's a story of the first generation of children born on Mars, and it's intended to be the first in a series. And I don't know, I have a memory of reading a book kind of similar to this as a child that featured children protagonists about my age experiencing a very realistic science fiction future. And it really fired my imagination. And I believe that this story can really do the same thing for kids of that age, could put them in the boots of these children who are walking out on the Martian surface for the first time, the first kids on Mars. And I think it's just it has the potential to be a really great and inspiring story for that age. Well, that's exactly what Robert Heinlein was up to with his books for young adults, mostly written in the 1950s that I certainly identified with.

And it drew me in better than any of the nonfiction space books that I had started out with before I discovered Heinlein and the rest of science fiction. Have you got a sample from this one? I do. So I thought I'd read part of the book where the child does the main character, Kaz, actually walks out on the surface of Mars for the first time. The outer door rolled open noiselessly and beyond was the surface. Kaz could see a flat red plane that stretched from the airlock door into the distance. Here and there were round buildings and rovers and rover parts stacked neatly. She stepped out of the airlock and felt a moment of

panic when she looked up at the sky. It went on forever and was not blue like the sky in the town. It was shades of yellow and tan, except for a hazy bluish area around the sun. The sun! That was the real thing! She'd seen pictures of all this, of course, but standing beneath it now for the first time, she felt small and scared. Her head swam and she looked down. That's quite a sky, isn't it, children? said Sally. It can be a little scary at first, I know, but come out, gather round, and we'll hold hands while we look, and then I'll skip forward a little bit. Cass held the gloved hand of the kid to either side of her. She was afraid to look up. She focused on her breathing,

counting three for in and three for out, and looked at the ground to steady herself. Her booted feet were huge. She scratched at the red dirt with one, dragging it forward and back slightly, then in a small arc, then in a big curve that became a C. She smiled. She looked up into that endless yellow sky. She let go of her classmates' hands and she raised her arms up toward that sky and she whooped. She opened her mouth and let out the loudest, wildest, craziest holler ever heard on the planet. That is wonderful. Nice work, Douglas Meredith. Yeah, it's enjoyable.

And I look forward to further installments in this series. And the cover of the book just happens to be, I assume it is a depiction of exactly this scene that you just read an excerpt from. read an excerpt from as these kids in their very, I don't know, maybe their 22nd century spacesuits step out onto the surface of Mars. Yeah. And I should mention that the illustrations in this book are really beautiful quality. They're full color paintings and they're just gorgeous. And those are by Luis Perez, as I see in your list. Let me mention one. It just happens to be one I'm familiar with because it's by Sarah Cruddas, who with a foreword by the astronaut Eileen Collins of the space race, the journey to the moon and beyond.

Also really well illustrated. I was very happy to see it in your list this year. And it's a great book. Sarah's much better known in the UK than she is here because she's kind of a science television personality over there. But it's a terrific book just called The Space Race. And now, please, sorry for the interruption, Emily, but go on. So I've got a great book for the middle grade group.

It's a young reader's version of an autobiography by astronaut Leland Melvin called Chasing Space. And Leland Melvin is probably best known on the internet right now for his astronaut portrait featuring his two dogs who are jumping all over him as he's wearing his orange flight suit. His story is really quite remarkable. He was actually drafted into the NFL. He played briefly for the Detroit Lions before being sidelined by a hamstring injury. He was actually on into the NFL. He played briefly for the Detroit Lions before being sidelined by a hamstring injury. He was actually on the Cowboys briefly, but was cut before the season started. And he went on to grad school and then became an astronaut, flew two missions aboard Atlantis, and is now retired from the astronaut work.

But he's doing a lot of work touring all over the country, giving talks, supporting STEM education, especially for Black youth. And I have to say his autobiography is just gripping. There are so many moments in his story that could have ended all hope of having any kind of distinguished future. And then there are all these kinds of moments of grace where things just line up and are lucky for him. And of course, he's skilled and intelligent and all of that. His writing is really excellent. But he never fails to give a huge amount of credit to all the people who helped him along the way. And so it's just, it's a delightful read. I haven't read the adult, the original version. This is the young reader's edition, but I assume it's just as exciting.

This is a fast read, and I'm sure it covers most of the same material. I'll note that the adult version of Leland's book is on your gift guide, which we will address in a few minutes briefly. It's a great book. Man, this guy has led an amazing life, almost lost the opportunity to become an astronaut for reasons that we won't go into. It would give too much away of the story. But I agree. It's great.

And just a very nice guy as well. He's visited us at the Planetary Society. Yeah, he really is. And the stories that he tells, you know, he certainly faced the same kind of discrimination all throughout his life as any other African American does. And he's also gotten extraordinary opportunities. He was actually, he actually had to be had to be talked into applying for a job at NASA. And he actually decided he wasn't going to apply to be an astronaut because he figured it was too long a shot. And then one of his friends applied and became an astronaut. And he's like, this five foot tall guy became an astronaut, or five foot four, whatever, became an astronaut, then surely I could do it. And so there's all these moments. It's really wonderful.

I have two selections from this book to read. Go for it. Okay. So the first is just after he's been selected as an astronaut, and he is talking about moving to Houston. I bought a house in El Lago, the neighborhood where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin lived at the time of the first moon landing. El Lago City Hall has an astronaut wall of fame with photos of all the astronauts who had lived there, 48 at last count, including me. The house I found was simple but beautiful, and I remember thinking, I could get used to this. On the other hand, some people had to get used to me. El Lago wasn't a place that had seen a lot of black people, let alone many black

astronauts. The day I moved in, a woman across the street stared at me, her arms folded across her chest. Hi, I said, and waved to her. She shook her head and walked back into her house. Thanks for the warm welcome, neighbor. So that's the first selection. And then here's the second one is coming at a time when it's actually right after, really the moment after the space shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry. Everyone at NASA headquarters was focused on one thing, taking care of our families. Every astronaut chooses what's known as a crew astronaut casualty officer, or CACO, when he joins the Corps. The CACO's job is to help the family interact with NASA in case of a disaster. That afternoon, I was asked to provide support to the

parents of David Brown, the flight surgeon who had been among the crew. I wasn't David's CACO, but he was a close friend. David had led the investigation to find out what happened to my hearing in the NBL pool. He helped me through one of the most difficult periods of my life with a patience and grace that I'll never forget. Skipping down a little bit. My son is gone. There's nothing you can do to bring him back, David's father said to me. But the biggest tragedy would be if we don't continue to fly in space to carry on his legacy. to me. But the biggest tragedy would be if we don't continue to fly in space to carry on his legacy. Judge Brown's comments, his grace in the midst of grief, hit me in the heart. I knew he was right. We couldn't give up. I couldn't give up. His strength and conviction in the shadow of what I

know was one of the darkest moments of his life changed how I felt about my place in the world and gave me a whole new understanding of what it means to think of others first. Oh, that's very affecting. Very nice collection. middle grade and teen books I recommend. Several of them are not even intended for children. They're just accessible to children. And I often find that books that work well for younger readers are really often the best explainers of experiences, of events, and they really kind of get to the heart

of what happens in major events. I got a great example of one of those that you also included in this age range of 11 to 13. And it's a visual galaxy, which is just as spectacular as you would expect a book to be from National Geographic. And you point out that it's about, it's not just pictures of the Milky Way galaxy and others.

It's really about the contents of the galaxy, including our own solar system. And it is gorgeous. Yeah, it's a whole planetary science textbook. Yeah. More of Emily and her list of great books is coming right up. But first, how about the Great Courses Plus? One of my favorite ways to learn. And it makes learning so easy and accessible. Thousands upon thousands of lectures on pretty much every topic that you can think of. And you can do it any place. Lunch break, the gym, washing dishes if you want. And here is a personal recommendation for you.

I highly recommend Apollo 11 Lessons for All Time. It is the Great Courses Plus special tribute to the 50th anniversary of Apollo. Four lectures, each one of them taught by a wonderful specialist in their field, looking at the geopolitics of Apollo, the moon itself, what the moon taught us about the rest of the solar system and beyond. It's absolutely outstanding. And here is that special deal that is available to you listeners. And here is that special deal that is available to you listeners.

You can go to thegreatcoursesplus.com slash planetary and get a free month, not just for this course, but every one of the hundreds and hundreds of courses offered by The Great Courses Plus. That's it. The greatcoursesplus.com slash planetary to start your free month. Have fun learning. Where to now? In the oldest age group, I'm recommending several books that, like I said, they're not marketed at teens. They're marketed to adults, just accessible to teens. And I have a really unusual and fun book by James Treffel and Michael Summers called Imagined Life. It's a book about astrobiology. So it explains in very plain language,

really easy to understand how we are looking for life in the universe, what we're looking for when we're looking for life in the universe, why we are looking for life that might look similar to ours, to life on our own planet, and some of the techniques that we're trying to use and some of the places in particular, the places where we're looking for life. But astrobiology is a funny sort of field. There's not a whole lot of data. In fact, we only have one planet where we know that life exists. And so it's a little hard to look for because we don't know exactly what we're looking for. And so more than half of this book goes into a little bit more speculative territory where they discuss some different kinds of planets where life might exist and how that life might have originated,

might thrive and live and consume energy and reproduce on these different kinds of exoplanets that we've discovered. And it begins each chapter with a little paragraph introduction that's just a little snippet of science fiction. The wonderful thing about this book is that it really provides a handbook for people who are interested in basing their science fiction writing on good, strong scientific fact. And so I highly recommend this book as a resource for anybody who wants to write hard science fiction. this book as a resource for anybody who wants to write hard science fiction. I was not aware of this book until I saw it in your list, but I have many books on my shelf, science fiction and nonfiction, about astrobiology, about the possibilities of alien life. And from that book that I mentioned right up front, the Life Science Library volume called Space.

What stuck with me more than anything in that book were the speculative drawings and paintings of possible aliens, including this beautiful color illustration of these floating furry gas bags with cat eyes that people speculate could live in the atmospheres of a place like Jupiter or the gas giants around the galaxy. Who knows until we go out and look for ourselves. But this is great stuff. And I want to pick this one up. Yeah. A long time ago, before we had all these wonderful space missions, we definitely had to employ more artistic imagination to imagine what was going on on other worlds. more artistic imagination to imagine what was going on on other worlds. Now, it may seem like there's less of opportunity for that. But one of the things I like to say the most about space

exploration, and really, actually any kind of science in general, is that in order to discover something, especially in space, you have to imagine what might be there first. You have to select missions and instruments that are designed for worlds you've never seen. And so there has to be this speculative imagination among the people who intend to explore planets. And so it's really great to see people who write science fact, who write nonfiction, get that opportunity to do all of this imagining. Fun stuff. I love this kind of speculation. Do you have something to read to us, a little sample of the imagined life? Yeah, I'd like to read to you the transition that goes from

the more fact-filled first third of the book and into the more speculative last part of the book. In what follows, we introduce each new world with a short fictional sketch that describes how a human being, suitably protected and provided with sensing equipment, might experience the environment he or she is encountering. We have chosen this way of introducing the planets for one simple reason. As we have repeatedly stressed, terrestrial life is the only kind of life we know about. It constitutes, therefore, the only living organisms whose response to the new environment we can guess at was some hope of success. With this in mind, let's take a look at a world that we will call Iceheim.

You are in a long, dark tunnel walled with solid ice. The only light seems to be coming from a far off volcanic vent that is spewing molten material from the planet's interior into your tunnel. At your feet, you dimly spot a pipe leading toward the tunnel's end. The air around it is warm and humid, and you see that it is squirting hot water to melt a clear path from the vent to the exit. Your stomach rumbles. Your trip here has made you hungry. You notice that around the volcanic vent are fields of tube worms, white and red. You sample one, not bad. Perhaps they could become a staple of your diet here on this strange planet called Iceheim. And so they go on to explain that Iceheim is a water world. It's a large world with a huge ocean that's covered with a very thick layer of ice.

So it's a little bit like Europa, but icier, waterier, and a standalone world as opposed to a moon of Jupiter. They do get to Europa later on in the book and to many other more unusual kinds of planets. So it's really an enjoyable read. Wow. I love it. Feet on the earth and head up among the exoplanets. That's just great. So as you can see, it's an enormous pleasure to get to read all of these books. I had 80 books to read this time around. I get more every year. And it is a bit of a chore.

It takes me a long time to produce this. I have to kind of stage it over days and days. But it's so fun. There are so many good books out there. And I love covering a little aspect of book publishing that's different. I don't think there's anybody else who's specializing in space books for kids. And so I like having my little niche of book reviews. It is a very fine niche and you fill it perfectly, Emily.

If you don't mind, I'm going to use my host prerogative and call out a couple of others in this 14 to 18 category, which you point out, these are as much adult books as they are for these young adults. category, which you point out, these are as much adult books as they are for these young adults. And then four more very briefly of my own choices, all of which were written basically for adults. But you mentioned Urban Legends from Space by Bob King, which I think is just delightful. I have not finished it, but it does everything that you mentioned that it does, helping to solve a problem that you and I both face. And I think the kinds of things, messages and correspondence that you probably see a lot more of than I do, where people come to you and saying, I've heard this, could it possibly be

true? And the answer is often no. Yeah. It's useful to have somebody, a resource to go to, to explain why something is not true. And so I'm really glad to have this on my shelf. I will point out that when somebody asks me if something is true, like if Planet X is really going to pull Earth out of its orbit, or if Mars is really as big as the moon, I try not to lead with that's wrong. I do try to pivot to something that is right rather than focusing my effort on something that's wrong. And so I'm happy to have other people doing the explaining, the debunking of these myths. Dr. Sagan would be proud of you for taking that approach. Just one other, just because it's an odd book, it's an odd theme, but it's a story very well told. Dr. Space Junk vs. the Universe by Alice Gorman, who is Dr. Space Junk. I absolutely love this book.

She's a delightful writer. She is an archaeologist. She began by studying some of Earth's most ancient human cultural artifacts in the Australian outback. some of Earth's most ancient human cultural artifacts in the Australian outback. But she became enamored with the junk that has been left behind since the dawn of the space age and what that tells about the evolution of human technology. It's an especially human science, the study of what's left behind in the waste heaps of human culture. And it's just very well told. in the waste heaps of human culture.

And it's just very well told. Yeah, not the kind of stuff that you find in the plethora of space books that you and I receive every year. I got, like I said, four more that I will mention from my own list. And a couple of these will be no surprise to regular listeners, including Four Small Creatures Such As We

by Sasha Sagan, the daughter, of course, of the aforementioned Carl Sagan and Andruyan. It is not specifically a space book, but it does help to establish our place in the cosmos. And as people have heard me say very recently, it is an absolutely lovely book. book and I think a perfect book for the holiday season because she talks about the celebrations, the rituals that we all enjoy, whatever our level of formal religion may be. The other one that we've talked about on the show, Spacesuit by Nicolas Demangeau, a very special book, which is about so much more than the development of the Apollo spacesuit, which was built, as we have mentioned, by essentially the parent corporation of Playtex, largely by seamstresses who got their start

sewing girdles and bras for that company. And a couple of others, Rod Pyle, our friend of the show, who I think wrote something like four books this year, but I will only mention one of them, Space 2.0. If you are curious about what is still called by many new space, this new era of space development, space industrialization, this is a great book for that. It's a terrific resource. It's very well illustrated. very well illustrated. Finally, from another friend of the show, Eight Years to the Moon by the great Nancy Atkinson. There were so many histories of the Apollo program. I know you were also inundated this year by these, right, Emily? Yeah, I absolutely was. I had a huge stack of Apollo books and reluctantly, I had to just not read any of the ones intended for adults because I had so many for children that I actually had to write a special July post just about the Apollo books. I felt terrible because there were so many of these that I would have loved to have featured on this show. There just wasn't time.

We only get to do 52 shows a year, but there are terrific selections. I will single out Nancy's book because she did amazing research. She talks to, for lack of a better term, I will call them the little people, although it's like that old saying, there are no small parts, only small actors. Everybody among the tens of thousands who contributed to the Apollo program helped to make it the success that it became. And Nancy talks to many of them and brings out a lot of stories, which I don't think have ever been documented in this kind of format in a popular book before. And it's terrific. It has all the major players as well. So Nancy, good on you as well. Emily, any other books you want to mention? Yeah. So there's some books that I just can't recommend

to kids. They're a little too dense, but I have one that I particularly want to mention for adults. It's called Cosmos, the Art and Science of the Universe by Roberta J.M. Olson and Jay Pasikoff. Olson is an art historian and Pasikoff is an astronomer. And it's a thick and heavy book, an art book, about how various aspects of space have been featured in mostly Western art throughout the ages. I've never seen a book quite like this. It's incredibly thorough. The artwork, the reproductions are just gorgeous. And it's richly analyzed by both authors. And it's organized in a way that's really fun. It's organized not chronologically, but rather by targets. So there

are chapters on the sun and solar eclipses, and on meteors, and on planets. And at the very end, there's a chapter that discusses how modern photography, including photography by spacecraft, has influenced our perception of space. I haven't had a chance to read the text. It's a bit long, but I'm absolutely delighted with this book. Many of the artworks I've never seen before. And because of the way it's organized, it's so easy to just dive into it and say, oh, I'm looking for an artwork that represents a comet. And you just go to the comet chapter and you can find a dozen artworks that would be perfect for my presentation on this, that, or the other thing. So it's delightful. I highly recommend it.

It has a place of honor on a table, not to say coffee table, in our living room. It's a gorgeous book. I am also working my way through the text, which is brilliantly written. And hats off to both of these authors, including, as you said, Jay Pasikoff, who we featured just last week as he was in the middle of viewing The Transit of Mercury, maybe the world's foremost chaser of eclipses, although he says that actually they chase him. Very briefly, Emily, let's go on to this gift guide, which is becoming available just as this episode of Planetary Radio becomes available.

We're often asked for recommendations for gifts around the end of the year for the holidays. And it can be a little difficult among our own staff at the Planetary Society to come up with a really wide array of gifts to recommend. So this year, we came up with the idea of asking planetary scientists and engineers and other science communicators for recommendations from them. And it was just wonderful to put together this list of about a dozen people. They recommended a wide variety of things from art to jewelry to clothing to books. It's just as delightful to see all of the different people and the different ways that they contribute to space exploration. It was great fun to put this blog entry together. And I think my favorites are the Little Bits Rover Kit, because I have a Little Bits kit myself that these snap together electronic components. But with this one, you can actually build a little little rovers, I guess. And the Wood and Native American Space Art that a couple of your guests chose. It's really a baker's dozen of gifts because one of your contributors had had a couple of gifts to recommend.

One of your contributors had a couple of gifts to recommend. All of this can be found, in case you missed any of these books or want to check out the gift guide. Everything, of course, is at planetary.org. They are blog entries from my esteemed colleague, Emily Lakdawalla, our senior editor at the Planetary Society. Emily, it's been delightful not just talking to you about these books, but hearing you read from them. As you can tell, I take great pleasure in reading from books. I have a long-held desire to do Reading Rainbow, but with space books. So if I could get away with that.

I'll only mention one other book because I still think it's available, right? There's a certain book about that spacecraft, Curiosity, that is still exploring Mars. There is. It's called The Design and Engineering of Curiosity, and it's written by yours truly. I published it two years ago now. I haven't finished its sequel yet, but I still, from time to time, get a really nice message on Twitter with a photo of somebody's copy that they're currently reading and telling me about a part that they liked. And that just gives an author the greatest joy. It's so easy to reach out to authors right

now via social media, and you don't know how much it makes their day if you just tag them in a little post and tell them that you're enjoying reading their book. Yet another book that stands alone. I've never read anything else like it. If you want to take a deep dive, and I mean a deep dive right into the core of what makes curiosity tick, Emily Lakdawalla is your author. And Emily, I look forward to talking to you again here on Planetary Radio. Me too, Matt. That's Emily Lakdawalla, Planetary Society Senior Editor and Editor-in-Chief of our magazine, The Planetary Report. By the way, there's one additional gift idea I think is pretty great. It's a membership in the Planetary Society.

Details at planetary.org slash membership. We've got links to my four recommended books on this week's show page you'll find at planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society is building the ultimate list of life goals for space fans, and we need your help. Hi, I'm Kate Howells, Community Engagement Leader for the Society. What's on your list? The must-see objects in the night sky, the most awe-inspiring destinations, the experiences of a lifetime.

Tell us about them at planetary.org slash space goals. We'll share them with your space soulmates around the world. That's planetary.org slash space goals. Thanks. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio, this home team edition of Planetary Radio. We're ready to hear about the night sky from the chief scientist of the Planetary Society.

That's Bruce Betts. There's a lot of stuff going hear about the night sky from the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. That's Bruce Betts. There's a lot of stuff going on in the night sky in the next few days. In fact, if people are interested, pull out those notebooks, those electronic devices, because I'm going to give you some information. First, there is a possible very brief meteor storm that will be visible if you're in Western Europe, Western Africa, South America, or the Eastern U.S. Probably not the Western U.S., maybe a little bit. But based upon where the meteors are originating from,

this is from a long-period comet. There was an outburst in 1995, and they think they were hitting a similar part of space where we would expect there to be up to 400 meteors per hour from a dark site, but it only will last like 15 to 40 minutes. So you've got to nail the time on that, and that's the other reason it's not good for half the world.

Either Thursday or Friday, so hopefully you've picked this up shortly after it came out Thursday or Friday, the 21st or 22nd, depending on your time zone. It is four 54, five zero universal time on November 22nd. That's 1150 PM Eastern time on November 21st. And these are the Alpha Monoceratids, which I might have kind of pronounced mostly right, named after the constellation Monoceros, the unicorn, not a very stunning constellation, but right near some very bright things in the sky,

including Canis Minor and Canis Major, where you have bright star Sirius and bright star Procyon. So have fun with that. But even if you can't see that or you don't hear this in time, listen to what else we've got going on. It is a planetary party in the evening and in the morning. So in the evening, we've got Jupiter and Venus, the two brightest objects out there besides the sun and moon, natural objects, in the west, fairly low down, but getting up there in the early evening, they will be very close together on the 23rd and 24th as they switch places with Venus getting above Jupiter,

above the horizon. Check that out. Two very, very bright objects. To their upper left is much dimmer, but still bright, Saturn. And then if that weren't enough, on the 28th, the evening of the 28th, the moon, the crescent moon will be above Venus in this wonderful line going from Jupiter to Venus to the moon to Saturn. But what if you fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon

and you wake up and you're awake in the pre-dawn? Well, there's stuff to look at there, too. You got Mars looking reddish in the east and to its upper right, the bright star Spica, bluish star, which is actually brighter than Mars right at the moment. And to their lower left for the next couple of weeks, Mercury coming up to party. So we've got a nice line with Mercury, the brightest and lowest, reddish Mars, and then above that to the upper right, bluish Spica. And wait, one last thing on the 24th, the morning of the 24th, the moon will be near Mars in that lineup. Thank you. And oh, wait, no, we're not done, but whew. Phew. Okay. Moving on to this week in space history, 2011, eight years ago, Curiosity was launched.

Headed off to Mars, did its little roving thing, still doing its little roving thing, making cool science. We move on to Random Space Fact! You're done? Done. In the Alpha Centauri system, the closest star system to our own solar system, the two larger stars called A and B are now named Rigel, Kentaris, and Toliman, they orbit around each other in a binary type way every 80 years. But the red dwarf star Proxima

Centauri, technically the closest star to our solar system, besides the sun, orbits the two of those in about 550,000 years. Kind of a big orbit. Not a whole lot of birthdays celebrated there. For those living on the Red Dwarf Star. It's hot, but it's not, you know, it's not sun hot. It's a dry heat. Good one. So in the trivia contest, I ask you, what mission was the first launch of the Saturn V rocket?

How'd we do, Matt? A huge response to this. And we didn't even offer any ultra special prizes other than, of course, a Planetary Radio t-shirt, which is pretty special now that I think of it. It's very special. We had a first time winner, I think, although he's been listening for a while. Nathan Mullen of Somerville, South Carolina said that the first launch of a Saturn 5, the fully configured moon rocket, was Apollo 4, correct? That is correct. Nathan, congratulations. You have won yourself that Planetary Radio t-shirt from Chop Shop.

You can see the whole Planetary Society store. They're chopshopstore.com. That's also where they have that new line of Ugin jewelry, chopshopstore.com. And a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account, that wonderful worldwide network of telescopes that you operate remotely. I don't know, maybe you could go and do it in person. I think they'd probably prefer that you do it remotely. What else can you tell us about Apollo 4 and the Saturn V? Well, it was crewed by no one. Trick question. It was uncrewed and was a test of the whole Saturn V rocket system. And as I recall, it went quite swimmingly. What do you got? human crewed flight was Apollo 7, right?

Which just went into orbit and kind of proved out the system. Yeah. Here's something from Pavel Parfinsik, or Parfinsik in Glasgow, Scotland. He says, Matt and Bruce, it's crazy that this behemoth of a rocket flew in 1967. Just think what could be achieved if the world would come together with current technology on to Mars and beyond, he says in a sort of inspiring way from Joseph Poutre in Fanwood, New Jersey. So why were the rockets assigned Roman numerals, but the Apollo missions with modern Arabic numbers, not necessarily that modern? Never mind the mix up of the Saturn 1B. So, yeah.

I don't know. Do you have an explanation for that? Let's see. No. No, I don't. I think I heard something about this one. Somebody will write in and tell us what the story was here. Maybe if Wernher von Braun just thought it was cool to use Roman numerals.

Finally, our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild, 363 feet to the top of the Saturn V, waiting to soar. The capsule was held in the grip of the ship. Apollo flight tag number four, the five F-1 engines ignited on cue, a jaw-dropping sight it was then. Apollo director Gene Kranz said it best, we all felt elated again. I don't even care if that's a real Gene Kranz quote, best, we all felt elated again. Oh. I don't even care if that's a real Gene Kranz quote, but I assume it was. Probably.

We're ready to move on. What is the new or relatively new name for the most distant object visited by a spacecraft? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until Wednesday, November 27th, the day before Thanksgiving here in the U.S. at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And speaking of chop shop store dot com, we'll give away another set from Ugin, that new line of jewelry. It is beautiful stuff. I bought a couple of pieces when we were all out at the launch of the Falcon Heavy. They had a booth there and a room that we set up. This will be an earring and necklace

set featuring LightSail and their little interchangeable images. It's very cool. You should check them out. Oh, we'll just leave it at that for now. That's a heck of a prize. Yeah. All right, we're done done. Alright, everybody, go out there look up the night sky and think about your favorite planet, then think about it spelled backwards. Thank you and good night. Let's see, that would be Hatre,

who I think was, that was a Saturday morning cartoon in the 80s, I think. He carried a big sword. You know what I like even better? Monoceros. I get it. I get that. I'll try to say it backwards. Ah, never mind. Just say goodnight. Goodnight, Bruce. That's Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its highly literate members. Have you rated or

reviewed us in iTunes, Apple Podcasts? Mark Hilverde is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan, Ad Astra.