Just Visiting This Planet

189 Pages·2011·2.18 MB·English

by  Tyson

The Andromeda spiral galaxy, Merlin’s home—a gravitationally bound
collection of more than 300 billion stars located 2.2 million light-years
from the Milky Way.
Also by Neil de Grasse Tyson

UNIVERSE DOWN TO EARTH

MERLIN’S TOUR OF THE UNIVERSE

A MAIN STREET BOOK
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tyson, Neil de Grasse.
Just visiting this planet / Neil de Grasse Tyson. —
p. cm.
1. Astronomy—Miscellanea. 2. Astrophysics—Miscellanea.
I. Title. QB52.T94 1998
520—dc21 97-47122

eISBN: 978-0-307-78409-4
Text copyright © 1998 by Neil de Grasse Tyson
Illustrations copyright © 1998 by Stephen J. Tyson
All Rights Reserved
August 1998

v3.1
T
o all those
who have always looked up,
and to all those
who do not yet know
why they should
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
began writing the Merlin column for Star Date magazine (then known as the
McDonald Observatory News) in 1983, and have written it ever since. While the
character development of Merlin and the full content of both books derived from
the column are original to me, the Q&A column itself was created several years
before by David Slavsky, then a graduate student at the University of Texas at
Austin and now dean of students at Loyola University in Chicago. Between
Slavsky and me, there were short terms of authorship by Jeff Brown and
Suzanne Hawley.
During the first few years that I wrote the column, Damond Benningfield, then
editor of Star Date (and now its executive editor), offered several stylistic
insights that have remained with the column. One of them is the fact that Merlin
speaks only in the third person, which lends the column its all-knowing “Miss
Manners” style.
Over my years of writing the column I have benefited from comments and
corrections through consultation with many colleagues, but especially from Drs.
Jeff Brown, the late Harlan Smith, Tom Barnes, Rick Binzel, Mike Rich, and
Robert Lupton. As always, my sister, Lynn Tyson, has served as a sounding
board and as an anchor to reality for many of my literary experiments before
they are penned.
C
ONTENTS

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Preface