On the day we celebrate the centenary of flight, STEPHEN LEWIS turns his gaze to the heavens.

THOSE stunning images of a green-and-blue Earth wreathed in swirls of cloud and hanging against the void of space have become so familiar it is hard to believe that until 50 or so years ago no one throughout human history had ever had such a view. If there is one thing guaranteed to give us a sense of perspective, it is those images of the frail and beautiful planet we call home.

They form the usual starting point of any modern atlas of the universe - and The Times Universe: A Photographic Guide is no exception.

Early in this lavishly-produced book there is a composite image of the Earth - assembled from images sent back by three different NASA satellites - that is both humbling and breathtaking in its clarity and beauty.

No matter how stunning our world is, however, turning our gaze on ourselves is not what an atlas of the universe is all about.

When the Italian scientist Galileo trained his primitive telescope on the night sky nearly 400 years ago, he saw unsuspected wonders. Mountains and craters on our own moon; four more moons orbiting the great planet Jupiter; and countless faint and never-before-seen stars far beyond the compass of the naked eye.

Galileo's findings revolutionised our understanding of the heavens - and yet they were made with a telescope that, by today's standards, was little more than a crude toy.

Now, in the modern era of spaceflight and the orbiting Hubble space telescope, which allows us to train an artificial eye on the furthest depths of the universe unhindered by the murky haze of Earth's atmosphere, our understanding of the heavens has expanded beyond all measure.

The Times Universe brings some of the breathtaking images that have resulted on to the printed page, in a photographic guide to the heavens that Galileo could only have dreamed of.

There is a photograph of the Earth rising over a lunar landscape, taken by one of the Apollo moonwalkers, that will bring a lump to any throat; images of Earth's nearest neighbours Mercury, Venus and Mars, taken by the Mariner 10 and Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, that will fill you with pride; and classic photographs of Jupiter taken by Voyager 1.

Jupiter's moons are captured in uncanny detail, thanks to the Galileo probe and further afield there are the starkly beautiful pictures taken by Voyager, of a ringed Saturn and the outer planets, Uranus and Neptune.

Even today tiny Pluto, pursuing its lonely course around the sun at the far outer fringe of the solar system, has still only been seen as a blurred image taken by the Hubble telescope - an image which reveals, nevertheless, that this remotest of worlds has a tiny moon of its own, Charon.

Further out still, and Hubble's eye reveals even greater wonders - whole galaxies and star systems seen with stunning clarity.

By focusing Hubble on the same small patch of sky over ten consecutive days we have even been able to look back into the early history of the universe and get an idea of how the first stars and galaxies formed.

By training Hubble for so long on one patch of sky, the faint glimmers of light emitted by galaxies inconceivably far away were picked up. So far away are they, in fact, that it took the light they emitted 12 billion years to reach us.

The images of galaxies captured by what has become known as the Hubble Deep Field are, in effect, 12 billion years old. Hubble can literally look back in time almost to the birth of our universe: and the Deep Field images reproduced in The Times Universe are among the most moving and thrilling I have ever seen.

The Times Universe: A Photographic Guide by Ian Ridpath is out after Christmas, price £12.99.

Updated: 10:05 Wednesday, December 17, 2003