Since the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit in April 1990, the 12-ton behemoth has been responsible for creating an image archive that accounts for 50 tetrabytes of data: the equivalent of five times the collection in the U.S. Library of Congress. Terence Dickinson, the editor of SkyNews magazine and author of NightWatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe, has compiled a visually breathtaking array of Hubble’s images in an extraordinary new volume.

Accessible but never condescending, Dickinson’s text describes the makeup of celestial objects from brown dwarfs to blue supergiants, and cogently explains Hubble’s major breakthroughs (such as allowing scientists to determine with greater accuracy the rate at which the universe is expanding).

But it is the images that are the main draw here: stunning full-colour photographs of everything from the Crab Nebula to the Whirlpool Galaxy. “Hubble has given us the universe,” Dickinson writes. This is a book to fill readers with wonder.