A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN ASTRONAUT, MARS, AND THE DISTANT STARS

A chorus of extraterrestrial items and phenomena from a black hole to astronaut poop tell their stories in this wide-angle graphic survey.

Having careened through history and science in previous outings, Barfield and Bradley wax astronomical both in topic and scope. In the course of surveying our explorations and observations of the universe, they give voices (and cartoon faces) to everything from chatty asteroids (“Yay, you rock!” “No, you rock!” “We all rock!”) and galaxies to astronaut food and oxygen molecules. Beginning with a tour of the solar system and ending with a flurry of space travel topics from living on Mars to the dangers of belching in microgravity, the loosely organized entries offer a chewy mix of introductions to cosmic mysteries like gravity and dark energy along with more intimate “secret diaries” from, for instance, a squirrel monkey who survived an early trip into space and a mouse on the International Space Station. Rarely if ever have the heavens seemed more accessible, not to mention voluble…and if the creators think that the closest black hole to Earth is at our galaxy’s center, which is wrong, they otherwise get their facts straight. For all the faces on display there aren’t many human ones, but several, such as NASA engineer Lonnie Johnson, are people of color.

A broad, breezy blast of astro-facts.