Under Alien Skies

A Sightseer's Guide to the Universe

by Phil Plait

English language

Published Feb. 13, 2023 by Norton & Company Limited, W. W..

ISBN:: 9780393867305

(3 reviews)

A rip-roaring tour of the cosmos with the Bad Astronomer, bringing you up close and personal with the universe like never before.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel the universe? How would Saturn’s rings look from a spaceship sailing just above them? If you were falling into a black hole, what’s the last thing you’d see before getting spaghettified? While traveling in person to most of these amazing worlds may not be possible—yet—the would-be space traveler need not despair: you can still take the scenic route through the galaxy with renowned astronomer and science communicator Philip Plait.

A rip-roaring tour of the cosmos with the Bad Astronomer, bringing you up close and personal with the universe like never before.

On this lively, immersive adventure through the cosmos, Plait draws ingeniously on both the latest scientific research and his prodigious imagination to transport you to ten of the most spectacular sights outer space has to offer. In vivid, inventive scenes informed by rigorous science—injected with a dose of Plait’s trademark humor—Under Alien Skies places you on the surface of alien worlds, from our own familiar Moon to the far reaches of our solar system and beyond. Try launching yourself onto a two-hundred-meter asteroid, or stargazing from the rim of an ancient volcano on a planet where, from the place you stand, it is eternally late afternoon. Experience the sudden onset of lunar nightfall, the disorientation of walking—or, rather, shuffling—when you weigh almost nothing, the irritation of jagged regolith dust. Glimpse the frigid mountains and plains of Pluto and the cake-like exterior of a comet called 67P. On a planet trillions of miles from Earth, glance down to see the strange, beautiful shadows cast by a hundred thousand stars.

For the aspiring extraterrestrial citizen, casual space tourist, or curious armchair traveler, Plait is an illuminating, always-entertaining guide to the most otherworldly views in our universe.

1 edition

The Weaver Reads reviewed Under Alien Skies by Phil Plait

Goodreads Review of Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer's Guide to the Universe

4 stars

It took me some time to get into this book, but I found it really rewarding. The book almost feels too easy and a little bit boring at the beginning with his discussion of the moon and Mars. You wonder, for a moment, if the book will only cover the color of the sky and differences in gravity. However, Plait gradually steps up the game, offering more detail and illuminating aspects about the universe. His discussion of binary systems (especially "P-Type Systems") was especially challenging for me, and his writing about nebulae wasn't the easiest either, although I was able to make sense of it.

(As an aside, what really stands apart in this book are the footnotes--they're great!)

Soh Kam Yung reviewed Under Alien Skies by Phil Plait

The book to read if you ever wondered how the skies of alien worlds might look like.

5 stars

A wonderful and imaginative trip through the Solar System and beyond as the author, using what we know from astronomy, along with some help from the 'ship of the imagination', to transport the reader to see what the sky would look like on non-Earth like worlds.

Starting with the moon, the author then brings the reader to Mars, the asteroids and comets, Saturn and Pluto. Moving beyond the solar system, the author shows what the sky would look like to an observer on a planet with two suns (like Star Wars' Tatooine), in a globular cluster with millions of closely packed stars and inside a nebula creating new stars. The final journey would be to a mind-twisting look at the last sky you would see if you were to go near and then enter the event horizon of a black hole.

If you ever wondered how alien skies could look …

If you ever wondered how alien skies could look like, this is the book to read. It is also a good book for writers who want to get the details of how the skies in their worlds would look like under alien skies correct.

Kelson Reads reviewed Under Alien Skies by Phil Plait

Fun and informative, melding sci-fi with the science behind it.

5 stars

A fun look at what it would be like to visit other planets or star systems, weaving together sci-fi scenarios, the science behind them, and the history of how those discoveries were made.

It starts with worlds we know the most about -- our moon and Mars, where we have plenty of direct measurements and photos from the surface -- and works its way out through asteroids, gas giants and their moons, and finally Pluto.

A fun look at what it would be like to visit other planets or star systems, weaving together sci-fi scenarios, the science behind them, and the history of how those discoveries were made.

The second half of the book delves into more speculative situations. Types of places we know exist, like star clusters and nebulas and different types of stars. Plait links these to specific locations where possible. We know a system of planets exists around the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, for instance, and we have a rough idea of how big, how far, and how fast the planets are that we've spotted so far. From there he imagines: if one of the three planets in its habitable zone is enough like Earth to visit, what would it be like to experience a red sun, multiple planets with visible phases, and so forth.

There's some repetition, but I think part of that is trying to make each chapter stand on its own in case you want to jump ahead to, say, visiting a black hole. (You do not survive the encounter.) And while there's a lot that I knew already from following space exploration from a distance, there are newer discoveries I'd missed, things I'd known pieces of but never really connected, and a deep dive into topics I'd only skimmed the surface of before.

Also, there's an insert in the middle of the book with photos. I didn't notice it until I got there, so I'd been looking up NASA and ESA pictures of the specific comets and asteroids on my phone while reading!

Some fun facts: 1. Martian sunsets are blue! 2. The biggest asteroids are like miniature planets. The smallest are like bags of rocks without the bag. (Or a really unpleasant 3D ball pit.) 3. Saturn's rings are surprisingly thin. Like, millions of miles across but only 40 feet thick in places. 4. The Orion Nebula is a bubble at the near edge of an even bigger cloud of dust. We can only see it because it broke through on our side! 5. It's entirely possible for a planet to have a stable orbit around one star of a binary pair -- or both! Sunsets on a world like Tatooine would actually look like they do in the movies! 6. I'm still amazed at how much we managed to get from a single high-speed fly-by past Pluto.

Review cross-posted on my website.