Expert Creates Travel Guide For The Universe

By John Ostapkovich

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Stars. They're over our heads every night and while we'll likely never get to visit one, there's a travel guide anyway.

Your Ticket to the Universe is based on two ideas; one: that there are plenty of places out there you'd go, if you could.

"Whenever we go somewhere we don't know, we go to the bookstore and pick up a travel book, and so we thought what better way to explore the Universe than by mimicking that format and making it accessible," says Co-author Megan Watzke.

So this is a sleek book that begins here on earth then ranges far and wide, based on an outgrowth of the second idea: what you and I see is very limited.

"Taking an alien to a baseball game and only being able to look down the third base line. That would be akin to only being able to see in optical light," she explains.

So the book boasts pictures from across the spectrum and the cosmos, some no doubt from the authors' own employer, the Chandra X-ray Observatory.