The Art of the Cosmos
Jim Bell
Union Square & Co £30 • HB
A book of pictures taken largely on a remote, automated basis by machines might ordinarily be a hard sell, but the images gathered here come from some of the most remarkable machinery ever built: mammoth telescopes, spacecraft and rovers exploring beyond the limits of human reach. As author Jim Bell, a former Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, argues in his accompanying text to this spellbinding collection, it takes people to plan, acquire and process these images.
Bell's own origin story in space photography is an example: helping oversee the Sojourner rover in 1997, he joined an attempt to capture a Martian sunset. Viking's images two decades earlier
