<p>Not long ago, while browsing a secondhand bookstore, I came across a volume entitled The New Atlas of the Universe, written in 1988 by the well-known popularizer of astronomy, Patrick Moore. The title of this handsome work, I admit, took me aback. Could it be true that the entire cosmos had really been probed, explored, mapped-and updated? But the book turned out to be far less than this, and therefore, in many ways, far more interesting. It was, in fact, an atlas of the solar system (a somewhat provincial version of "the universe"), consisting mainly of detailed images and maps of the planets and their moons, along with respective lists of surface features recently identified by various spacecraft.</p>
<p>This might sound rather humdrum. Yet another view of Jupiter's giant red spot? One more close-up of Saturn's auroral rings? Mars, as we know it so well, still a rusty, windswept, and boulder-strewn surface? Such was the visual chorus I expected to find, a coda of images tantamount to photographic clich</p>