Unique! Sun! One in a Billion by Stacey McAnulty

Once upon a time--40 billion years ago--a magnificent and important star was born.

Me! Your Sun (with a capital S!)

He's a big star--um, make that... middling-sized star as stars go--(technically Sun is a yellow dwarf, but he's not crazy about that designation)

But he is a radiant sphere of gases, loaded with energy, the just-right Goldilocks star for our home planet, in one of the universe's best neighborhoods, which we earthlings call the Milky Way. Oh, sure, there are 100 billion stars there, give or take a few million, and he's not the biggest, but that's a good thing for Earth. To us, he's one BIG star! We even named a day of the week for him!

I give you heat and light(You're welcome!)

But the Sun has a bigger job than just lighting and warming Earth. He has a whole bunch of bodies to keep together in his solar system. Without him, self-centered as he is, they are just like loose cannons! Some of them are regular and predictable, but some have, er, eccentric orbits, a bit hard to manage, and they do occasionally squabble over their relative importance or position at a given time, but Sun, who takes his duty very seriously (with great gravity, you might say), has it all under control, keeping everyone in his place, and he still has time for some his hobby, artwork--check out his gorgeous sunrises and sunsets!

And Sun is dependable.

So grab your shades. I plan to be in the biz for another six billion years.

There's an, er, bright future ahead for Earth and Sun, in Stacey McAnulty's just published Sun! One in a Billion (Our Universe) (Henry Holt, 2018) in a bright and breezy nonfiction book about our sun, straight from the old gas ball's mouth, so to speak. McNulty lets Sun do the stand-up comic narration, introducing himself to young readers, with the, er, luminous illustrations by artist Stevie Lewis.

Share this one with McAnulty's companion book, Earth! My First 4.54 Billion Years (Our Universe) (review here).

First Taste of Space: My Best Pop-Up Space Book by Clare Lloyd

WE LIVE ON PLANET EARTH.

EARTH IS ONLY A SMALL PART OF SPACE!

You're never to young to blast off into space, in Clare Lloyd's My Best Pop-up Space Book (Dorling Kindersley, 2015).

Beginning with Earth--our own place in space--author Lloyd gives youngsters a quick overview of the the planet that is home, describing how it spins on its axis to bring us night and day while revolving around the sun to bring us the seasons of each year, and backs up the narrative with a dramatic double gate-fold of the solar system.  DK (Dorling Kindersley) pioneered those spot-art illustrations that have become their trademark, executed here by Caryn Jenner, pictures that seem to pop from the pages, and in this book they actually do with exciting pop ups and fold-out constructions that fire the imagination.

There is even a sound-effects button (the red spacecraft) that provides the sound track for this voyage to the moon, the sun, the planets, and the stars in outer space, and the book's movable devices demonstrate how the moon's phases change during its cycle.

Little readers also get to suit up and board their own rocket ship as astronauts and prepare to blast off!

ASTRONAUTS LIVE AND WORK IN SPACE.

EVERYTHING FLOATS IN SPACE!

IMAGINE EATING AND SLEEPING WHERE EVERYTHING FLOATS!

Preschoolers get to cruise past the moon rovers on Mars, rings of Saturn and the many moons of Jupiter, all in the three dimensions of DK's sturdy board book pages for the youngest space voyagers.

IS THERE LIFE ON MARS? THERE MIGHT HAVE BEEN IN THE PAST. LANDERS CALLED ROVERS LOOK FOR CLUES!

DK's My Best Pop-up Space Book gives youngsters their own first taste of the science of the stars. Just press that red button, open the book, and lift off!

Our Place in Space! Space Encyclopedia: A Tour of Our Solar System and Beyond by David A. Aguilar

The discoveries astronomers make sometimes change the way we think about ourselves and our place in the universe.

In the next 25 years we may know the answers of these really big questions: What caused the Big Bang? What invisible force is speeding up the expansion of the universe? Are there other universes out there besides our own? What type of life exists on other planets?

And kids now in the middle school years will be the scientists who participate in answering these big questions! For a good start toward that role David A. Aguilar's Space Encyclopedia: A Tour of Our Solar System and Beyond (National Geographic Kids)(National Geographic, 2013) provides science-smitten middle readers with a solid discussion and eye-catching illustrations that offer the latest information on our own solar system, from the orbit of Mercury all the way out to Oort Cloud on the border of deep space.

With ample color illustrations, from insets to double-page spreads, Aguilar begins with his chapter "What We Know" at the known beginning, the Big Bang, and the formation of solar system objects, asteroids, comets, and planets, from the resulting space dust.  Continuing outwardly, there are chapters titled "Tour of the Solar System," "To the Stars and Beyond," "Are We Alone?" and "Dreams of Tomorrow." With lots of little-known facts and citations  of the findings of various space probes,  from the manned Apollo missions through Explorer 1 in 1958, Mariner 4, the Viking Landers, Voyagers I and II, the COBE satellite, Magellan, the Hubble Telescope, the Mars Rovers, Cassini, and the New Horizons (flyby of Pluto),  Aguilar covers the basic information, the hot topics, and still unanswered questions of space science in a conversational tone and in a straightforward style that never talks down to his readers, filling them in on new knowledge and  firing their curiosity to know more.

For research paper writers, this book should be the first go-to source: it offers a reference-user's dream of an appendix, with timelines--a Timeline of the Solar System, Timeline of Humans on Earth,  and a Timeline of Astronomy--and an ample glossary of terms and an index with indicates pages with illustrations in boldface.  For browsing, school report writing, and general information for the science buff, this book is great for library or home reference shelves, and a great birthday or holiday gift for science-loving young people.

Out There: Beyond: A Solar System Voyage by Michael Benson

It is now almost 400 years since Galileo first peered in wonder at Jupiter and its four circling moons through his small 20x telescope. What he saw eventually changed our world view forever. Over those centuries mankind has learned much about our own solar system, and Michael Benson's Beyond: A Solar System Voyage (Abrams, 2009) gives us breathtaking views of the sun and its planets for which Galileo would doubtless have given all he had to see.

Benson emphasizes that his is not a comprehensive history of planetary knowledge. As he says in his introduction...

With its emphasis on the visual, Beyond is not meant to be a detailed study of the many astonishing scientific discoveries we've made along the way. Rather, this book provides a photographic introduction to the astonishingly diverse landscapes that wheel like gigantic clockwork around our central star, the Sun.

But despite his disclaimer that "the visual harvest of these unmanned space missions belongs as much to the history of photography as it does to the history of science," his introductory chapters are exceedingly well-written accounts of humankind's gradual understanding of our planetary neighbors. Benson begins with the ancients, the sky tablets of the Babylonians, and takes the reader through early astronomers from Philolaus, Seleucus, and Aristarchus to Copernicus, Galileo, Huygens, and then to the modern space race which engendered twentieth century discoveries and exploration.

Nevertheless, the matter of this book is its stunning, awe-inspiring, photos of our space family, presented in the order of the trajectory of NASAs robotic orbiters--first Earth and its moon, then Venus, the Sun, Mercury, Mars, and the giant planets, as shot by several generations of spacecrafts, from the Lunar Orbiter of the 1960s through the two Voyagers, Mariner 10, Viking, Magellan, Galileo, Soho, Cassini, and the rest. Adjectives fail to describe the visual impact of these scenes set against the velvet black of space--Earth and its moon as seen together from a fly-by, the dark side of the moon, the flaring, exploding sun red as a furnace, Venus' surface as seen by x-ray photography through its swirling clouds, the red surface of Mars and its dark, rocky moon Phobos, asteroids so close you feel you can touch them.

And then there are the gorgeous, literally other-worldly shots of the giant planets: Jupiter's Great Red Spot, up close and personal, the boiling surface of Jupiter with its moons, icy-blue Europa and fiery Io, sailing below us with the great planet's face beyond them; Saturn's rings seen from all angles and one surreal photo from high above Saturn's pole showing the dark side of its rings and the long shadow of the planet itself streaming away from the Sun. And then there are the "ice giants," Uranus as pale, smooth, and glowing as an egg, Neptune as brilliantly blue and icy as its name suggests, not to mention its quirky moon Triton, the coldest known place in the solar system which nevertheless supports volcanic activity!

Although the author suggests that the text plays second fiddle to the photographs, there is plenty here for the reader to glean--a history of robotic space exploration, an explanation of the trajectories and operation of these craft, and plenty of basic information and tantalizing tidbits learned through these space voyages. For example, in its 2005 fly-by of Saturn, Cassini learned that Saturn's E ring is composed of ice crystals provided by the liquid water geysers of its moon Euceladus, which freeze as they spew forth into space to form another ring around the planet.

Beautifully designed with thick, glossy black pages against which is set white type and the glorious colored prints, Beyond: A Solar System Voyage is a book for the space geek, the would-be astronaut, the nature photographer who thinks big, and anyone who is willing to think about the beauty and wonder that is our own place in space. As the author concludes...

And if Beyond conveys some of what these strange and beautiful places would look like to someone lucky enough to see them glimmering through the windows of an interplanetary spaceship, then the book has succeeded.

A substantial appendix includes a glossary, a bibliography of useful books and web sites, and a fully detailed index.

Other books of photographs from the solar system and deep space include Benson's companion book for adults, Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes, Voit's Hubble Space Telescope: New Views of the Universe and Kerrod's Hubble: The Mirror on the Universe.

Nonfiction That Makes the Grade: Downsized--Pluto from Planet to Dwarf by Elaine Landau

In lieu of an Introduction, Elaine Landau's new Pluto: From Planet to Dwarf (True Books) offers a FIND THE TRUTH! page which begins

Everything you are about to read is true except for one of the sentences on this page.

Which one is true?

T or F Pluto was named by an 11-year-old girl.

T or F Pluto is a planet.

FIND THE ANSWER IN THIS BOOK.

In August of 2006 Pluto was officially downsized and downgraded to the status of dwarf planet, rendering countless science books and millions of styrofoam science fair solar system models obsolete.

Into this breach comes the grandaddy of beginning chapter nonfiction series, Childrens Press True Books to fill the void. Under new management (the overlord Scholastic Press), the venerable True Book (formerly known as New True Books) series is being updated even as Pluto has fallen into the status of solar system benchwarmer.

Actually, in veteran science writer Elaine Landau's hands, even as a lowly dwarf planet Pluto still has quite a bit to recommend it. The author not only provides the usually facts and figures about this far-out body, but includes the Pluto trivia that makes it an intriguing place to visit--as the already launched space probe New Horizons will do in 2015.

Even though Pluto was bumped from the Big Nine (now Big Eight) planets for lack of sufficient gravity to clear its orbit, it boasts an almost horizontal axis, a lopsided, "overly oval" ellipse, three moons, one of which, Charon, at half its size, is big enough so that it and Pluto orbit each other in a curious do-si-do which keeps Charon at a standstill in Pluto's sky. Pluto even has a new neighborhood, the Kuiper Belt, a new acronym as a KBO, or Kuiper Belt Object, and a new big sister, KBO Eris, to hang out with out there.

Landau adds a double-page timeline in the book's midsection, titled The History of the Mystery, and the back matter provides a glossary, an appendix made up of The Statistics, a Resources section, including books, organizations, web sites, and places to visit, and a very detailed index. Wrapped up in 48 pages, with plenty of cool space photos and an Accelerated Reader level of 4.9, that science report is as good as done.

For similar content at level 2.2, see Childens Press's 2008 Pluto: Dwarf Planet (Scholastic News Nonfiction Readers: Space Science) by Christine Taylor-Butler or Capstone's 2008 Pluto (The Solar System) at level 2.1.

Oh, BTW, Pluto was indeed named in competition by eleven-year-old Venetia Burney of Oxford, England, after the Roman god of the underworld. Contrary to popular belief, Mickey Mouse's dog Pluto was named after the (dwarf) planet, not the other way around.