A while back I got an email from a student who wanted to make a career in science writing. Among the questions she asked, she wanted to know how I decided what topics to write about. Science writing is sort of like getting a huge box of candy (no, I’m not going to make a Forrest Gump comparison here). The cosmos presents a lot of things to us that are like chocolate-covered lumps. You just have bite into them to find out what they are. I never know what flavor I’ve got in a given topic until I bite into it.

Some topics grab my attention because they’re hot and happenin’ — for example, a press release about a discovery in another galaxy comes my way and it spurs a story. Sometimes I get a commission to write about a specific topic, like an article I did for Sky & Telescope about gravitational lensing. The same thing happens with planetarium shows, although the last one I did for a client outside of Loch Ness Productions was actually about the universe itself. As you can imagine, it was pretty broad. The producer basically presented me with 20 minutes of science visualization and said, “Here, write us a story about the cosmos.” So, I did.

Books are kind of a different story, if only because I figure out what I want to cover in a book, think about how it will be illustrated, and then I propose it to a publisher. If they like it, they bite on the proposal. Visions of the Cosmos grew out of my interest in sharing the universe with readers and showing it in as many wavelengths as astronomers study it in. Jack shared that interest with me, and so we went to work sifting through great pics that would either illustrate what we wanted to say or give us a new and interesting way to write about hot topics in astronomy. There are millions of great images out there, taken in every part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and each one has a story to tell about how the universe works, how it came into being and where it’s evolving to. Unfortunately, as Jack and I point out in our preface, we can’t possibly publish all the pictures, and choosing from the many excellent science images that came our way was a delightful, if frustrating task. We ultimately settled on 187 or so images that would help tell the story, and off we went.

There are more stories out there in science than you can possibly imagine. Which is great — they’re wonderful fodder for me, for my planetarium shows and books, and for all the future science writers who follow the stories of the cosmos.