Cycles of Fire: Stars, Galaxies, and the Wonder of Deep Space

This book is a walk-through of fantastic hypothetical vistas around planets, stars, and even galaxies in the cosmos. While seriously dated (pushing 20), and aimed at an audience with little or no astronomical background, the art is amazing and inspiring; this book did more to fire me up for astronomy as a child than any other. This is art you can daydream with. Highly recommended.

Although the science is a bit out of date (nothing horribly wrong, it just doesn't include more recent information on extra-solar planets that have been discovered, Pluto's downgrade from planet, etc.). The main strength of this book is its wonderful illustrations. The pictures are wonderful, but the real gems here are the conceptual images painted by artists to conceptualize things like the view on a planet with blue and red suns, the sunset on a planet that circles a gas giant at a great distance from the sun, the daytime view on a planet that has multiple suns (I think there are 7 in the image I'm thinking of), plus depictions of black holes (not black dots on a background of stars at all), a dual-sun in which one sun is slowly drawing gas from the other, etc. If you have an interest in science fiction, cosmology, etc. you may find this book very interesting to browse through. The only reason I rated it a 4 is due to its age and lack of recent information.