The Failsafe Gift Guide - Heaven & Earth

We were at Phaidon's Boxpark store in East London at the weekend and were very happy to see Heaven & Earth proving such a hit with visitors as we've been poring over it every day for months.

Many of the fascinating photographs in it - taken with electron microscopes or satellite mounted telescopes - of atoms, crystals, grains of pollen, snowflakes, cloud formations, comets and showers of stars have revolutionised our knowledge and understanding of the world and universe around us. When laid out on a coffee table they also look amazing and invite you to spend hours playing that favourite Christmas Day game: kettle limescale or surface of Europa?

So we've put together some of the most fascinating images featured in the book - from the bubble chamber trails above, created by sub-atomic particles colliding, to part of the Orion Nebula, photographed from the Anglo-Australian Telescope.

Astronomer and expert in astronomical photography David Malin, says in the introduction: "Art and beauty underlie the images in Heaven & Earth and are a recurrent theme throughout, but many of the pictures here are of places and things that are for one reason or another, beyond our ability to appreciate directly. Some pictures are of things that are too small or occur too quickly for us to notice, while others are unimaginably large and distant and happen on timescales that are as long as time itself. The only reason for exploring them at all is human curiosity, which is formalised in the processes of science, but the images that result from the quest for knowledge are often remarkably beautiful as well as informative."

Sign up to the membership scheme for preferential treatment and very special offers on Phaidon books.