JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Cellulose vs. stars: one of these images is an image of stars, the other is an image of slowly deteriorating paper in a book.  I think that this could be more convincing if I looked harder for a more convincing book, but I decided to go with the semi-random choice, below. As it is it is enough to give pause to some sort of thought, no doubt a quote of a stars-in-the-sky-as-in-a-book variety could probably be found, I think we’ll let this one go simply recognizing a certain similarity. 

 Image 1; front free endpaper in Chemical News, London, 1878.

Image #2: Skylab astronomy, from http://history.nasa.gov/SP-404/ch2.htm  Figure 2-20. “Ultraviolet photograph of the Pleiades taken with the Schmidt-Cassegrain camera system (21-min exposure). The Schmidt-Cassegrain camera system obtained ultraviolet pictures of 36 star fields. A typical observation target, the Pleiades (fig. 2-20), was photographed in a 21-min exposure. It is an example of a group of some 300 young, hot stars (not all seen here) formed about 60 million years ago. The stars are embedded in nebulous matter, which produces the haze seen around the bright stars. This haze is seen in the ground-based,…..”