Bargain Volume Of Photographs

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31934, 11 March 1969, Page 8

Bargain Volume Of Photographs

Really first-rate books on space activities are scarce. Only a handful have ever been published. Bookshop shelves abound with colourful volumes on locomotives or racing cars—but few on rockets and spacecraft.

There are countless pictorial hard-backs presenting in “living colour” any part of the world you care to choose—except the world itself.

| Most exploration titles take the reader no further into . space than the peak of Mount Everest. It is therefore quite [a publishing event when a book of the calibre and content of “Exploring Space with a Camera” appears. Edited by Edgar M. Cortright, a senior official of the {United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “Exploring Space | with a Camera” is a 214page compilation of the best black and white colour photographs taken by a wide varietry of spacecraft. For less than $5, the reader is privileged to see the Earth, Moon and Mars as only spacemen can view them. Each picture is accompanied b; a text written by the man responsible or most closely associated with its acquisition. The result is a fascinating chronicle of the major achievements of the space age. As ;one leafs through the large quarto pages of “Exploring Space with a Camera” the real meaning of spaceflight is made clear and it is quite apparent that a revolution has begun in our attempts to uniderstand our planet and its environment. Ice Information

This book is, naturally enough, organised on an historic basis commencing with a selection of photographs and mosaics taken by weather satellites. Although their primary function was meteorological the pictures were useful in many other ways: ice I patrols for instance. A series lof photographs from Tiros 4 traces the retreat of ice from the Gulf of St Lawrence in the spring of 1962, while four years later Essa 1 and Essa 2 showed the development along the west coast of England of a lead in' the ice choking the Gulf of Bothnia. Some remarkably detailed photographs from Nimbus 1 covered France and the British Isles, revealing the outline of the forest of Landes in southern France and suggesting for the first time the utility of satellite pictures in forestry studies. While the outline of the British Ises, for example, is quite unmistakeable in a satellite photograph the same cannot be said for the coast of little-explored regions such as Antarctica. An interesting map and picture taken by Nimbus 1 discloses how Mount Siple, in Marie Byrd Land, is located a whole two degrees west of its mapped position. The frontispiece of the book is a full-page colour picture of the western hemisphere taken by an ATS satellite 23,000 miles above the mouth of the Amazon on the equator. Valuable In School

School geography teachers will find this book exceptionally valuable in the classroom. In the photo-mosaics from the Essa weather satellites and the global views from the stationary ATS satellites it is astonishing how clearly the trade-wind belts, the “roaring-forties” westerly wind zones and other long-recognised features can be identified. In a pair of Essa-3 mosaics showing each pole, the North Pole appears dark and the South Pole white. Why? Because the photographs were taken in the northern winter when the

North Pole was in the darkness of a six-month polar night and the South Pole was enjoying unbroken daylight. The next section shows the moon and Mars. Besides awesome panoramas of the forbidding lunar landscape there are many fascinating closeups which reveal the roperties of the moon's topsoil. It is obvious that the Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter spacecraft have fulfilled their prime purpose of proving that men can safely set foot on the moon. An interesting pair of photographs demonstrates that areas which appear smooth when viewed from the earth can differ considerably in { roughness. So much so that one of the areas, initially chosen as a potential landing site for Apollo missions, has been ruled out for future manned landings. Among the interesting features shown in the photographs are boulder-fields and clear tracks where large boulders have recently rolled down-hill. A shot taken by Lunar-Orbiter 2 includes the crater made by Ranger 7 when it plunged into the Moon at a speed of five thousand miles an hour. Another, taken by Lunar-Orbiter 3, pinpoints Surveyor 1 sitting on the flat expanses of Oceanus Procellarum.

No reviewer could hope to enumerate the wealth of geological—or, rather, selenological information contained in the Lunar Orbiter photographs. The obvious presence of laval flows, tectonic structures such as domes and collapsed volcanoes show beyond doubt that volcanic activity has played a large part m moulding the lunar surface. On the other hand the Orbiter 4 photographs of the Orientale Basin suggest that the large lunar basins were formed by impact, as were the majority of lunar craters.

The third and last section of “Exploring Space with a Camera” is another which cannot fail to excite geologists and give pleasure to any reader. It contains the pick of the colour photographs taken by American astronauts as they circled our globe. As well as the abounding geological information the pictures yield data on almost every phase of man’s activity on the surface of this planet. Landmarks Visible A Gemini-5 photograph of the Bahama Islands displays the topography of the ocean floor with amazing clarity. A careful look at the picture of north-west Australia taken from a height of 740 miles by Gemini -11 reveals several seasonal lakes, namely Lake Mackay, Lake Disappointment and the long chain of lakes meandering from the Percival > Lakes in the Great Sandy Desert. They provide excellent checks on the accuracy or otherwise of various atlases! On many of the photographs it is possible to locate roads and railways and in a view of southern Texas the huge Houston stadium is discernible, along with the sprawling Manned Spacecraft Centre and other landmarks. Particularly beautiful is a Gemini-12 photogaph of the Nile Valley and the Bed Sea over which can be seen the long cloud bands accompanying a high altitude jetstream. “Exploring Space with a Camera” concludes with a short appendix of colour pictures and specifications of the spacecraft from which the space photographs were taken. The book contains a few minor errors, mainly

brought about by a few pictures oriented differently from their accompanying captions, but they can be recognised fairly easily. Otherwise the production is excellent value, particularly for highschool libraries. Copies are obtainable from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 20402. Refer to the book as N.A.S.A. publication SP-168 and remit 8U54.75 a copy, which includes 50c for postage and packing. Alternatively, it may be ordered through the larger booksellers.