by Michael DiMario

Title: Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe

Author: Philip Plait, PhD

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY

Publication Date: 2023

Total Pages: 336

How many of us have read tour guides taking us to far off places with descriptions so detailed that you wish you were immediately there resulting in planning and booking your travels. The book Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe is such a book for touring our solar system, the Milky Way, and grand deep sky objects. The author and astronomer, Dr Philip Plait who has worked on the Hubble Space Telescope Team analyzing data specifically on the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, also known as The Bad Astronomer, is an advocate of NASA’s public outreach. He has written for and appeared in several science documentaries.

Plait brings the reader from the couch comfort of Earth to the Moon, onto Mars, the asteroids, Saturn, Pluto, and objects outside of our solar system exiting into a Black Hole to be unnoticeably spaghettified. The author uses the latest scientific data to translate what it would be like to walk or “shuffle” about the surface of the Moon coursing through the sunlit moonscape into the dark regions and shadows with exacting detail of the issues of moon dust. Plait continues the adventure of the astro tourist onto Mars to watch the blue sunsets, two moons fill the sky, and then to sail past the rings of Saturn. The astro tourist may wish to skim through the various atmospheric layers of Saturn and may contemplate landing to find that its surface is gaseous with an eventual hard surface of metallic hydrogen. Beneath the metallic hydrogen will eventually be a rocky core followed by extreme temperatures exceeding the surface of the Sun.

Another fascinating place Plait brings the astro tourist to is a planet caught in a binary star system such as Star Wars’ Tatooine and the experience to live on such a planet of which a third of all stars may be in a binary system. The remaining stars are in a more complex arrangement such as Mizar which is a four-star system. The Earth’s single star is actually atypical.

For anyone that wonders what it would be like to travel and experience destinations of the solar system and beyond, Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe is an enjoyable read.

The author includes a “Further Reading” section for even more detail on the destinations that are reviewed to further enrich your travel plans.