Inspired by the euphoria of her friends when they first entered the inflatable planetarium at Britain’s Jodrell Bank Discovery Center, astronomer Ruth Grützbauch comes up with an idea: a mobile planetarium that she can take straight to her audience on a cargo bike. Since 2018, she’s been cruising across Austria on her Cosmobike bike to inspire kids and adults alike to catch a glimpse of the stars.
Personal, fun and educational
The title of her first book, “Per Cargo Bike Across the Galaxy,” combines her passion for her Cosmobike with Douglas Adams’ science fiction classic “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” that fits the book perfectly: personal, entertaining, and educational with a conversational tone. . Grützbauch begins each chapter with a personal anecdote, for example about the times of observation in the observatories, her studies or her daily work. The only exception is the Hubble Space Telescope class, which I felt so creatively in a specialist role during the space shuttle repair mission.
After these quiet introductions, she devoted herself to various topics in astronomy, which can be best summed up under the ambiguous slogan “All About Galaxies”: from their formation, evolution and end to their merger and observation to “cosmic greenery” such as dark matter, dark energy, background radiation and the cosmic principle. The author moves chronologically through the life of a galaxy and answers the question: “Is the Milky Way an ordinary galaxy?”
With so much material, their explanations sometimes degenerate into page-length descriptions of various cosmic processes, peppered with amusing comparisons and illustrative examples, yet still a bit tricky in parts. Readers with no prior knowledge in particular can easily get stuck or lose a thread here, even though they seem to be the actual target group for the book.
“Explorer. Communicator. Music geek. Web buff. Social media nerd. Food fanatic.”
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