Turn Right at Orion: Travels Through the Cosmos

This is a factual astronomy book written in the form of a science fiction story.The narrator, a lone astronaut who meticulously describes his interstellar journey, begins by taking us to the giant black hole in our Milky Way's core. He then orbits the black hole in Cygnus X-1, two neutron stars in separate Crab nebulas, glides into accretion disks forming newborn planets around infant suns in the Orion Nebula, and then flies around the star Betelgeuse, a bloated, unstable, red supergiant.His spacecraft then departs the Milky Way galaxy and enters the Large Magellanic Cloud where he's almost obliterated by a supernova. Finally, he flies to the Virgo cluster some 60 million light years from Earth where he goes into orbit around the colossal and ferocious black hole at the core of the radio galaxy M87.This book's author, Mitchell Begelman, describes each cosmic panorama with such vivid, colorful immediacy, you feel like you're really there. I read this book over several nights at bedtime, and after falling asleep, I would instantly find myself dreaming about interstellar space flight.What more could a book like this offer?The name of the spacecraft in this story is "Rocinante," which is an inside joke because the author acknowledges borrowing it from the rock group Rush who in 1977 and 1978, wrote two musical scores about a lone astronaut who flew his spacecraft called Rocinante into the black hole Cygnus X-1, only to emerge from the collapsed stellar core as the most powerful god on Mount Olympus.I wish more authors would write science books using vibrant, creative storytelling. Maybe Begelman could collaborate with a paleontologist to write a time travel chronicle that zips along 550 million years of natural history, from the Cambrian through the Pleistocene.