(2) K-3 The James Webb Space Telescope is the latest "great observatory" collecting data on distant galaxies and stars from a position orbiting Earth. Slade skillfully explains NASA's decades-long and at times precarious process of designing, building, launching, and operating the telescope. The focus is mainly on the technical aspects of the engineering project, but there is also helpful consideration of the political and financial costs of keeping a complex technology project aloft. Abundant photographs of the people, machines, and facilities involved illustrate the telescope, with its distinctive hexagonal mirrors, under construction; the rocket launch into orbit; and then the payoff: crisp, striking images that show never-before-seen objects and give new details about familiar stars and nebulae. Excellent, in-depth captions provide valuable information, in particular when describing which data is accessed to produce each space image. The back matter provides schematics, information about historical space telescopes, and resources for further reading.

Reviewer: Danielle J. Ford | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2025

(2) K-3 Illustrated by Adria Meserve. Seventeenth-century "natural philosophers" Galileo Galilei (who looked out into the universe using a telescope) and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (who looked closely into water droplets with a microscope) made their important scientific discoveries in astronomy and microbiology, respectively, using innovative improvements to the glass lens. As the cleverly constructed narrative moves chronologically through the lives of both scientists, it steps back and forth between them, highlighting the parallels in their experiences as well as emphasizing the practices and passions of science. Both men had creative aha moments, were meticulous inventors, and remained patient in the face of setbacks on their paths to discovery. They also depended on the scientific community and larger society for patronage and acceptance or rejection of their published scientific models, which led to challenges -- Galileo with the Catholic church and Leeuwenhoek with his unwillingness to share his lens technologies. Meserve's entertaining and informative illustrations are filled with details about the scientists, their objects of study, and the places and times in which they lived; the compositions employ inventive designs to underscore common features of the scientists' lives and work. Galileo and Leeuwenhoek are united in spirit in the final illustration of stars, planets, and the Milky Way filling the sky above a pond crowded with bacteria, microbes, and other tiny living creatures.

Reviewer: Danielle J. Ford | Horn Book Magazine Issue: November, 2024