Satellite Books

The human exploration of distant worlds is a very thrilling subject. Remote/robotic exploration is almost as exciting and can certainly stir human emotions and imagination. This book is about such an event - the exploration of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, through the Cassini mission. By any standard, this is certainly a most amazing accomplishment. The book's first author was, and apparently continues to be, an active scientific participant in this project. Unfortunately, I found that the book falls a bit short of generating in the reader the expected thrills of such an achievement and of the resulting discoveries. The writing style is certainly quite authoritative, generally clear, mostly accessible, occasionally engaging but often a bit dry. There are several detailed descriptions of some of the technical issues that needed to be resolved, as well as of what was being observed on Titan and how these observations were/are being interpreted. I felt that these often dry, frequently lengthy and detailed accounts were at the cost of recounting a continuous gripping story filled with the excitement of discovery and the potentially unpredictable human elements. But on a technical/scientific basis, this book is indeed quite excellent. Consequently, this is a book that would likely be thoroughly enjoyed by serious planetary science buffs. It could also be used as useful reading material in a planetary science course. However, general readers who are looking for an exciting story may be a bit disappointed.

Christiaan Huygens (1629-95) discovered Titan on March 25, 1655, the first planetary satellite to be discovered since 1610, when Galileo had found four moons of Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. For 200 years, Titan was called "Luna Saturni." By 1848 so many moons had been found that Sir John Herschel proposed giving moons individual names based on Greek mythology, including "Titan" for "Luna Saturni".

Titan dwarfs the rest of Saturn's satellites, and is similar to Jupiter's four largest moons. It is 5,150 km across, nearly 50 percent bigger than our own Moon and 6 percent larger than Mercury. Titan has a significant atmosphere, discovered in 1944 by Gerard Kuiper who found methane in Titan's spectra. In 1980, Voyager 1 passed Titan at a distance of 4,394 km. but was unable to penetrate the thick cloud cover with its instruments.

On July 1, 2004, Cassini arrived at Saturn after a seven year journey. (The orbiter was named for Giovanni Domenico Cassini, the French-Italian astronomer who discovered four of Saturn's moons and the gap separating the two main rings.) It was designed to return images and data from Saturn, its rings and its moons, especially Titan. It carried a detachable package of instruments (the "Huygens Probe") that parachuted through Titan's atmosphere to observe its surface.

"This book tells the story of how Cassini and Huygens have finally begun to lift the veil of mystery surrounding Titan, beginning with advancements in our understanding of Titan that took place in the decade preceding Cassini's arrival. Some predictions have proved gratifyingly accurate; others have turned out to be misconceived, however plausible they may have seemed initially. Though many questions can now be answered --- even some that no one thought to ask --- they have quickly been replaced by a torrent of new and deeper puzzles." (Taken from the Princeton Press reprint of the first chapter of this book; see press.princeton.edu/chapters .)

The photographs are superb, and the authors have produced a wonderful description of this fascinating moon. Anyone with the least interest in science, astronomy or the history of our own earth will find this book well worth reading and enjoying.


Robert C. Ross 2008

Do you want to know what it's like to be on the front lines of a planetary mission? If you do, then this book is for you! Authors Ralph Lorenz and Jacqueline Mitton, have written an outstanding book that describes the most recent episodes in the unfolding story of the exploration of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

Lorenz and Mitton, begin by describing the dropping in of the Huygens probe on the surface of Titan. Then, they examine the state of knowledge about Titan at the time when Cassini and Huygens arrived in the Saturn system. Next, the authors discuss the arrival of Cassini in the Saturn system on July 1, 2004 after a very long trek from earth. They continue by focusing on the last speculations the science teams had about Titan, getting to work on the first results from Cassini's initial approach and the Titan flyby. In addition, the authors also discuss the probe's decent onto Titan on January 14, 2005.
They also describe the Cassini flyby events in chronological order. Finally, the authors discuss the 16th flyby of Titan that took place on July 22, 2006; as well as, present and future mission objectives.

The authors of this most excellent book give prominence to two investigations: First, the surface of Titan and its interaction with the atmosphere have been the most mysterious; and second, the Huygens probe and the RADAR instrument on the Cassini orbiter. More importantly, the authors believe that the atmosphere and the surface of Titan in particular, will interest general readers the most.

Great overview of the general topics in earth science. The only thing that I wish the book included would be question sets to review the material. I would use this book more as a resource for myself than my students.

I was looking for a basic science book to introduce Earth Science to my kids. Too many of the books I looked at were "dumbed down". I just wanted basic coverage of science without politically correct commentary. This books gives nice coverage to the topics without obvious slanting towards anyone's agenda. I like it. (Yes, biomes are threatened, but I'd like to teach my kids about them before I talk about why they are threatened.) All in all, a good basic book.

Perhaps the best collection of images of Soviet Space hardware I've ever seen. Many of the photos seem to have been taken in a museum. Best of all are the up close, detailed images of probes and spacecraft.

Drawbacks: Published in the late 80's, it's a bit dated. Its frequent use of the "older" nomenclature for boosters and spacecraft make it hard at times to compare with today's name for the same item. For example, the Soyuz booster is today said to be based on the R-7 rocket, while in this volume it's called "A-1." However, the fault is entirely that of the Soviet Government, who were forever changing the names of design bureaus, launch centers and spacecraft.

This hardcover book describes Soviet ( Russian ) hardware at its best. It covers the Soviet manned and unmanned missions up to MIR space station. Both informative and great documentation value, great photos and drawings of all Russian hardware.

These volumes comprehensively treat the entire body of knowledge concerning GPS control, satellites, propagation, receivers, and use. There is an extensive discussion of GPS errors: raw, differential, corrected, and the encrypted precise positioning service.

Unlike IEEE volumes that seem to be magazine articles jammed together, these volumes appear to use systematic, top-down architecture of the outline. Each section is a coherent explanation of the topic, without any unevenness in coverage.

The authors are well-known principals in this field. Spilker, for instance, has generated the most significant books in digital communications; modulation and demodulation being his specialty.

I found these volumes to be so impressive that I bought the set for my personal use.

This book is very technical so for the beginners in GPS i can not recommed you to read this book. however, for scientific community, this book is "a must'

This volume has more than 200 full color and false color satellite images of the surface of the earth. They've been selected for their interesting aspects and their beauty, although in a few cases images taken at two different times are presented so that a comparison can be made between earlier and later. Of current (September, 2005) interest is the photo on page 223: New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain. Part of the caption reads: "Damming of the Mississippi river north of New Orleans has prevented vital silt from reinforcing the river delta, with the result that the city is slowly sinking into the gulf of Mexico."

If you're interested in the earth or if you have a child or children over about 11 years old this would be a very good volume to own.

Many years ago I bougt a NASA volume "Mission to Earth: Landsat Views the World." That was published in 1976 and also had many stunning images. The advances in photographic and satellite imaging technologies since then have been remarkable and the photographs in the newer book very much show those advances.

This is a marvelous oversized book, reasonably priced, with stunning images from high up in the sky of much of terrestrial Earth. I look at it more as a work of art, and less as a reference you'd expect from a typical atlas of the world. If you need a reference of roads, and cities, and any specifics, look elsewhere. However, if you want to visualize Antarctica in the raw, or the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, or the Vatnajokull Glacier in Iceland, then this is your book.

My personal favorites: Bourtange in the Netherlands, Rome, Venice, Vesuvius, Moscow, Mecca, Yemen, UAE (a number of great photos), Iran (check out the Great Salt Desert), the Ganges Delta and the Lena Delta, Mauritania, Algeria (chicken skin), Australia, the Amazon, and many more.

Again, if you are looking for a map, go elsewhere. This is stunning photography from a perspective not seen by humans standing on this earth.

I'm a big fan Nick Pollotta's Bureau 13 novels and when I found out he'd written another series under a fake name I had to dig it up. I finally found this series in an old used book store and enjoyed these almost as much as his Bureau 13 books. They're funny and easy reads. If you really liked this series I reccomend the Bureau 13 novels as well as Illegal Aliens.

It is not often that I pick up a book that makes me want to track down the author and demand sequeals... lots and lots of sequels. This book, and its author fall into that category, a book that grabs your mind and wraps you into the story in a way that is impossible to describe.

While not a technically challenging mystery, the weaving of the multiple characters and the story lines make this a well written, fast paced read. I strongly recommend a solid stomache for off-beat humor, and a penchant for the toungue-in-cheek.

My copy has been lost somewhere (but I still own the sequel). I will be issuing the out-of-print search for a replacement copy.

Buy this book before your next plane flight, or your trip to hawaii. you'll love reading this.

If you have a favorite nightspot this book is for you. Even if you've never been to a club you'll enjoy the wild and exciting Satellite Lounge. The only thing missing is the alcohol.

This book was a fun read. I felt like I spent a night out on the town without leaving my chair. These stories gave me a variety of emotions, especially, Eubie's Fountain. I actually cried on this one. I can't wait for Mr. Houston's next book.

This is the best reference book available right now, but 10 years is a long time for technology. Buy the book. Read the book. Get on the web and go to the Remote Imaging Group in the UK and learn the rest.

This great book, writen by Dr. Taggart, is probably the single greatest source of information about weather sats, both low orbiting and geostationary. Construction articles allow even a novice to build antennas for the low orbiting birds. Many photos show how your station needs to be set up as well as pictures from the sats themselves. In the back of the book is several pages of advertisements related to the subject matter. This a great reading book and one you must have for your collection.

Though this does have the PKD signature on it, the plot is not exciting. One of his classic characteristics is that you almost have to be mentally ill to fully understand his concepts. This is no exception. As most PKD fans know, PKD suffered from mental illness himself, and he used it as fuel to write.

After my latest fugue on Planet Phil, I discovered that I had not reviewed this one. First off, I don't think this is Dick's strongest work but is certainly emblematic. Frustratingly it makes it an ideal entry point for the novice PKD fan but certainly obscures what makes him unique. While not as clunky as "The Pennultimate Truth", I just don't feel that it is Phil firing on all cylinders. While the characters are Dickian, the connect is not as strong as a "Radio Free Abermuth" or a "Valis". It is almost no surprise that the alien, Lord Running Clam, is the most sympathetic character here. Running Clam is almost like the reader in that he is involved but not entirely bonded to the lead character. Now the ideal rating would be three and half as the constant reader of PKD can see that this as a step in the author's movement from world builder to philosopher. Each turn of the plot points towards a unique point of view that pushes SF towards a more personalized vision than a mere excercise in space opera. Admittedly while I found the texture of the plot more interesting than the usual "how is this going to end", I do recognise the cleverness of the construction. And it is certainly more engaging than the dry construction of "The World That Jones Made". Dick is, if not a dazzling stylist, a remarkably focused writer. His interests are crystaline and consistent. It is just here that it is smuggled inside a late 50s/early 60s SF novel. While a novel like, say, "Counter Clock World" is more consistent with later period PKD, this is certainly the breeziest of Phil's novels and much better written than some of his early pieces. So if you are going to read this just make sure to make it part of a double header. Perhaps team it up with "The Man in The High Castle" (A classic with a bit more heart) or "Now Wait For Last Year" (A more mind-melting traditonal SF work from the mid-period). Then make sure to follow up with something really great like the aforementioned "Valis" or "Ubik".

There are precious few books by Dick I haven't read yet, and I still consider this one to be my very favorite.

All of the classic, wonderful Dick themes are represented: Paranoia, conspiracy, maliciously evil women, simulacra, assassination attempts, and a telepathic slime mold from the planet Ganymede named Lord Running Clam, who may be the best Dick character ever written.

Of all Dick's books, this one made me laugh out loud and shake my head with amusement the most. I would recommend it to hardcore Dick fans and first time Dick samplers alike.

Clans of the Alphane Moon was written in the same year as three other books by Philip K Dick after he peaked early in his career with the Hugo award winning - The Man in the High Castle, highly original in either being a very divergent type of sci-fi or a deviating political comedy. Dick is often cited as the best science-fiction writer who does not write sci-fi, but some of his works, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner) and UBIK, come across as more descriptive in the future they present, rather than ideology and dialogue driven. Clans of the Alphane Moon tends to be a situational environmental type of Dick presentation, rather than then latter, somewhat harder, but more heady science-fiction herbs that rely on dialogue and thoughts to tell their story. It is the environments the writer conjures up that makes this one of Dick's easier books to read, comprehend and probably enjoy.

Clans of the Alphane Moon is like an early version of UBIK, developing a series of events, rather than a full story, to engage characters with other characters, in the most interesting of environments, under the most oddest circumstances. It focuses on dysfunctional relationships from the persona and how that is reiterated through the cosmos like an expanding fractal, Dick himself was married five times, here a couple, in process of getting separated, end up on a Moon run by the offspring clans of various mentally ill people who once occupied a Terra owned hospital there. Each clan has a personality character disorder that affects their role in life, down to their functions in government offices and their own disturbed nuclear family (again we have the dysfunctional relationship problem), with the looming background crisis of a CIA backed pharmaceutical company invading the Moon, to reclaim all the citizens and lands because they are all genetically insane - only to be double-crossed by Terra's entertainment industry, homicidal CIA agents turned scriptwriters, walking talking telepathic slime moulds, RBX303s and government executive love date drink spiking. It is not as funny or as heady as UBIK but certainly is a lot crazier.

Alphane Moon has all the ingredients that you can expect in a good Dick novel but maybe not as much philosophy as it could have delivered on given such a rich premise, but then again Dick is always more suggestive and overall elusive in that he never delivers on it straight in a predictable way and is the reason why second guessing the next page will never turn out the way you expect making Alphane Moon as original as any of his other works with classic characters like CIA robot simulacra and slime moulds that regenerate by sporing when they die, a galactic mini-drama with an innovative design, although crazy in parts, that is exactly what the Alphane Moon is... but then again how do the people from Terra really compare?

This is one of Dick's earlier works and maybe a little more down the avenue of choosing a follow up Dick novel to one of his more readable classics like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or Ubik, where the reader is urged to go first, and certainly try to get in The Man in the High Castle to see how polarized this science-fiction writer is, the latter works towards the end of his career more metaphysical in nature as the writer descended into his own madness or genius (he believed an entity called VALIS was controlling him and even wrote a book about it).

I choose this after reading "The Simulacra" and will move onto the other novel he did that same year "Martian Time-Slip" next. See you there.

Beware. If you have a slightly twisted sense of humour, reading this book could make you seriously addicted to Mr. Dick. It was the first of his I read, and I ended up befriending a second-hand book dealer just to get hold of some of his rarer books. Sad but true.
You have been warned.

This is a very helpful resource for those of us who are new to GPS.

This is a great font of GPS information. You can get the basics of a GPS and begin to enjoy It. Then as you get more proficient with your GPS, you can return again and again to the book for in-depth information about the many different uses for a GPS and of course, a chapter on geocaching.

I have had a GPS unit for almost a year now with no hope of understanding just what it can do or how to use it due to the arcane nature of the owner's manual.I have no clue as to why the manufacturer's write such poor manuals but they do. In response to my frustrations I decided to try Joel's book as a means of understanding what this small device could do and just how to get it to do what the promotional materials say it does. After reading most of Joel's book I was able to go to work using my GPS unit and understand how to negotiate its features with relative ease. Realistically it isn't perfect but it sure is a great place to start if you are like me, clueless as to how to interpret the gibberish in the owner's manual.

Copywrite date was 2004. Seems a little outdated in some places. Other than that, it was very helpful and full of useful Websites.

I bought this book because I had recently purchased a GPS and was frustrated by the techno speak in the manual. I was looking for something to help me through the jargon.

Only about 1/3 of the book is specificallly about your GPS. A small section is about cartography and the rest deals with "digital mapping" (more jargon for computer software dealing with maps). All of the information is at least loosely tied to a GPS. There is no glossary section but the author does embed many clarifications of technical terms that are helpful for dummies like me.

The GPS sections are an improvement over my manual but still only partially sucessful. Priorities in choosing and mastering a GPS are miniscule. The cartography portion has information that is both interesting and helpful and does not bog the reader down with irrelevant information. These two topics are discussed in the first seven chapters.

The book then turned to digital mapping and I almost gave up on the book. I had no interest in mapping and I wasn't totally satisfied with the previous sections. Luckily I continued on. The mapping chapters are almost exclusively about mapping software (and little utility programs that help). The software information includes commercial, shareware and freeware programs. It discusses programs for the beginner on up to some heady stuff. You may want to take up the subject as a hobby even if you never were interested before. If I had the time I would be tempted to just play with this stuff because it is so cool.

If you buy the book, I would first just skim this "software" portion of the book when you go through it the first time. I think there are 14 chapters. It is amazing what is available but also sometimes redundant. I would use it only as a reference and study only the sections you need at that moment. Reading it word by word might be wasteful.

I do wish that the author had separated the utility software into a separate chapter so that those jewels could be returned to easily. I found them very useful.

The book is a mixed bag. The software chapters are the best part. The GPS info is not going to thrill you. The reading is pretty easy for a technical book.