Canada from Space

Many space photography books have been published that show a wide variety of geological features, ocean currents, cloud structures and human impact on the land, such as Orbit by Jay Apt and the Home Planet by Kevin Kelly. However, due to the restrictions of orbital mechanics associated with Space Shuttle Flights as well as all other US manned space flight, most of the pictures taken by these crews, cover the latitudes between North 45 degrees and South 45 degrees thereby excluding a fair portion of the Earth's landmasses. In this book, the author, using the remote sensing Landsat satellites, shows the reader a variety of Canadian landscapes using quality color photography. I believe that this is the only book to date that deals exclusively with space photography of Canada.After a brief introduction describing Canada's use of remote sensing, the book presents 48 full-page color pictures highlighting Canadian landforms, farmlands and cities, with accompanying text and its location on a map of Canada. Some typical photographs include: glaciers and glaciated land, impact craters, mountains, farmland, cities, the Great Lakes and the coastal shorelines. I personally found the pictures of the impact craters and the glaciers quite interesting and very impressive. While I'm sure that the author could have presented many more pictures of his country than he did, he has given the reader an excellent overview of the diversity of landscapes in his country and I feel like visiting right now to see first hand what I saw in the book. If you're tired of all the space photography books that cover primarily the United States, you should be pleasantly surprised with this book that provides some unique remote sensing observations of our neighbor to the north.