NASA offers free e-book for iPad owners

NASA offers free e-book for iPad owners -

What a nice holiday gift from NASA: it's an interactive e-book available in the iBookstore called Hubble Space Telescope: Discoveries, featuring beautiful images, video and animations relating to the space telescope that is giving us striking new views of the universe we live in.

"These new e-books from NASA will allow people to discover Hubble and Webb in a whole new way - both the science and the technology behind building them," said Amber Straughn, an astrophysicist on the Webb telescope project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "They collect all of the amazing resources about these two observatories in an excellent product that I think people will really enjoy."

The e-books are highly interactive and include image galleries and videos. Tracy Vogel of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., is part of the design team that put them together. "For instance, the readers can watch a galaxy collision simulation video, manipulate a telescope model to see it from all angles, or flip through a gallery of planetary nebulae - all right there on the page," Vogel said.

If you have an iPad the book is available at this link. Be forewarned; it's a hefty download, almost 900 MB. The e-book requires iBooks 3.0 or later and iOS 5.1.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)