Turn Right At Orion (Paperback, Revised)

This volume offers the account of an epic astronomical journey, a tale told by an early 21st century human sailor among the stars. The account is discovered, as an alien translator's note reveals, sixty million years in Earth's future - the product of one man's amazing, revelatory, and occasionally perilous space odyssey. Astrophysicist Mitchell Begelman takes the reader to far-distant shores, across a vast ocean of time, in a narrative that zips along at just below light speed. We travel to the centre of the Milky Way, witness the births and deaths of stars, almost perish in the crushing forces at the perimeter of a black hole - and all the while the author explains the way things work in the cosmos. Grounded both in history and in astrophysical thinking and observation, Turn Right at Orion is serious science that reads like fiction.