Seeing Earth From Space
   Patricia Lauber
  1990 Orchard Books NY USA
   ISBN: 0531059022


Seen from space the Earth appears astonishingly small & fragile, with a thin shell of atmosphere. With breathtaking illustrations from NASA & the European Space Agency we soar above the world & are given a god's eye view.

This winter has given us a few opportunities to stare at the heavens with its twinkling stars & necklaces of constellations. At those times the thought occurs to me - what must we look like from outer space?

Well, Patricia Lauber has written a book about that around the watershed photos taken predominantly by NASA from the Apollo missions & the Space Shuttle.

We go Sightseeing with big color photographs of the topsides of thunder heads set afire by lightning; the bird's foot of the Mississippi Delta; sunrise high over Florida; salt flats in a windblown Iranian desert; giant eyes of typhoons over the Pacific & so forth on around our little blue marble.

Sometimes it took me a long time to see what the words told me I was looking at, so far away is the perspective. My mind literally had to soar & expand to encompass the views.

I remember the first time I flew above the clouds & looked down upon them & where they broke apart, caught glimpses of the Earth below. In these photos we are much, much higher so you can see the big picture of patterns.

Pacific islands look like amoebae, alive & well in a deep indigo petri dish of an ocean. Looking down upon the Himalaya Mountains, like crumpled crepe paper with cake icing atop almost gave me vertigo. Me, a mere mote peering down at those mighty giants.

Scanning the different desert photos, noticing the varied dune patterns & sand colors. Scanning the cloud photos, noticing the varied patterns & wind directions. Eyes of hurricanes, ocean depths, land masses.

The Remote Sensing section is all about information sensed & recorded in green, red & infrared wavelengths creating marble-like images of extraordinary beauty. Sometimes I'd swear I was looking at the veins in my eyes!

Spaceship Earth took my breath away as did these photos when first we saw them back in the 1960s. What a fragile little world on which we live!

Seeing Earth from Space is a must for any family's library:- to remind us of how far we have flown & how much a part of the whole we all are.

More from Patricia Lauber: Volcano: The Eruption and Healing of Mount St. Helens; The News about Dinosaurs; Tales Mummies Tell & From Flower to Flower: Animals and Pollination are among her more than 80 books for children.
(02/27/00)

Rebecca