Galaxy: Exploring the Milky Way by Stuart Clark (2008) Hardcover

Look into the hazy river of stars that flows across the night sky and you gaze into the center of our Galaxy. Over two hundred and fifty thousand trillion miles away, amid the bright star clouds of Sagittarius, lies the point about which the Milky Way's 200 billion stars all revolve. Such distances, such numbers, such a view defy the imagination. Yet the incredible advances of modern science have built a compelling portrait of our cosmic habitat and armed with this hard-won knowledge, we can now confidently navigate our Galaxy's 100,000-light-year span, exploring and explaining the wonders of the deep night sky. With Stuart Clark's lucid text and nearly 500 cutting-edge images, Galaxy investigates every aspect of the Milky Way - from its place in the Universe to its large-scale anatomy, from its history to its future. We approach the Milky Way from the very edge of the Universe, threading our way through massive conglomerations of galaxies gathered like grains of dust on a veil of cobwebs. Out here we can survey the thriving diversity of galaxy types and galactic life. Homing in on our destination, we skirt fleets of satellite galaxies, orbiting our Galaxy like the Moon orbits the Earth, before plunging through the Milky Way's spiral arms on a course that will ultimately lead us to its dark heart - a gravitational maelstrom of white dwarfs, neutron stars and hypergiants, all in the thrall of a supermassive black hole. As we tour the Galaxy the rhythms of stellar life unfold before our eyes: we pass through dark clouds of dust and gas incubating clusters of embryonic stars, we discover spectacular emission nebulae blazing in the fierce radiation of stellar newborns, we watch dying stars bloom and fade as planetary nebulae, or tear themselves apart as supernovae and we survey the planets and moons of our Solar System.