Reprint of the original, first published in 1872. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

The problem of scale pervades both the natural sciences and the vi sual arts. The earliest scientific discussions concentrate on visual per ception (much like today!) and occur in Euclid's (c. 300 B. C. ) Optics and Lucretius' (c. 100-55 B. C. ) On the Nature of the Universe. A very clear account in the spirit of modern "scale-space theory" is presented by Boscovitz (in 1758), with wide ranging applications to mathemat ics, physics and geography. Early applications occur in the cartographic problem of "generalization", the central idea being that a map in order to be useful has to be a "generalized" (coarse grained) representation of the actual terrain (Miller and Voskuil 1964). Broadening the scope asks for progressive summarizing. Very much the same problem occurs in the (realistic) artistic rendering of scenes. Artistic generalization has been analyzed in surprising detail by John Ruskin (in his Modern Painters), who even describes some of the more intricate generic "scale-space sin gularities" in detail: Where the ancients considered only the merging of blobs under blurring, Ruskin discusses the case where a blob splits off another one when the resolution is decreased, a case that has given rise to confusion even in the modern literature.

This book looks at the inside deliberations that led to President George W Bush's space exploration initiative. The author team has been granted unprecedented access to senior policy makers as the plan was assembled during 2003 and 2004. Sietzen and Cowing will give exclusive details on the meetings between President George Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, and senior members of the White House staff as the planning process began. In addition Sietzen and Cowing will examine how policy was translated from paper into hardware designs including the first outline of the plan's new space vehicle and how the inspiration behind the architecture once used in the Apollo program was summoned back to guide 21st century space planners. Sietzen and Cowing will describe how the Columbia accident and the political outcry for a new central goal for the US space program gave rise to what would become the most far reaching change in US space policy in a generation. Readers will have the most comprehensive look available on what this new space vision will do for human exploration of the Solar System -- and how nearly everything NASA does will change as a result. New Moon Rising: The Making of America's Space Vision and the Remaking of NASA, by Frank Sietzen, Jr. and Keith L. Cowing, to be published July 2004. The team broke the story on the space plan in the pages of the Washington Times and in the United Press International wire service. Portions of the book were serialised in the Times in a multi-part background article called "Why Some Said the Moon: The Exclusive Inside Story of the Bush Space Vision" published in January 2004.

Discusses how the findings from the Hubble Space Telescope have affected the way scientists study the universe; includes photographs that were taken by the Hubble Telescope of the planets, distant galaxies, black holes, and the Shoemaker-Levy comet.

Can astronauts reach Mars by 2035? Absolutely, says Buzz Aldrin, one of the first men to walk on the moon. Celebrated astronaut, brilliant engineer, bestselling author, Aldrin believes it is not only possibly but vital to America's future to keep pushing the space frontier outward for the sake of exploration, science, development, commerce, and security. What we need, he argues, is a commitment by the U.S. President as rousing as JFK's promise to reach the moon by the end of the 1960 - an audacious, inspiring goal-and a unified vision for space exploration. In Mission to Mars, Aldrin plots that trajectory, stressing that American-led space exploration is essential to the economic and technological vitality of the nation and the world. Do you dare to dream big? Then join Aldrin in his thought provoking and inspiring Mission to Mars.