the explorers journal - The Explorers Club

e v i e w s
edited by Milbry C. Polk
328 pp • New York: Harry n. Abrams, 2009
• ISBN: 978-0-8109-4948-5 • $55 • Reviewed
by Angela M.H. Schuster
In his latest literary offering,
Far Out: A Space-Time
Chronicle, visionary writer/
filmmaker Michael Benson
takes us on an extraordinary
journey through both
space and time—a whirlwind
tour of sorts from nearby
F a r O u t :
A s p a c e - t i m e C h r o n i c l e
by Michael Benson
nebulae only a few hundred
light-years away—and well
within our own Milky Way
galaxy—to the infant stars
of an early universe, still
cradled at the edge of time,
more than 13 billion years
in the past. The visually rich
coffee table volume is illustrated
with more than 200 of
the finest astronomical images—captured
not only by
Hubble but several powerful
and well-known land-based
telescopes, including the
3.6-meter optical/infrared
Canada France Hawaii
Telescope, perched atop
the summit of Mauna Kea.
The chapters in the book are
meant to be read either front
to back or back to front, for
the farther out one goes, the
closer one gets to the beginning
of the story.
Along with essays on the
state of astronomical observation
and current theories
of cosmology, Benson offers
us myriad chronological waypoints
that tell us just what
was going on Earth when
the light we now observe
was issued forth. For some
of the images, astronomers
of the Renaissance were on
trial for herasy. In the case
of Giordano Bruno, he was
burned at the stake in 1592
for believing that the stars
in the sky were suns like our
own, orbited by satellites.
Benson tells us that the sunlight
that touched Bruno’s
face on that May day will
not reach the Pleiades for
another three decades. For
those worried about intelligent
life out there judging us
and our culture from early I
Love Lucy episodes, Benson
says, worry not. What they
are sure to see is a primordial
Earth—as chronologically
primitive as it is distant from
their vantage point.
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