In the universe there is always room for another surprise. Or two. Or a trillion.

Take the Witch Head Nebula, for example  a puffy purplish trail of gas in the constellation Eridanus. When a picture of it is turned on its side, the nebula looks just like, well, a witch, complete with a pointy chin and peaked hat, ready to jump on a broomstick or offer an apple to Snow White.

In 30 years of covering astronomy, I had never heard of the Witch Head Nebula until I came across a haunting two-page spread showing it snaking across an inky black star-speckled background in “Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle,” an exquisite picture guide to the universe by Michael Benson, a photographer, journalist and filmmaker, and obviously a longtime space buff.

Actually “exquisite” does not really do justice to the aesthetic and literary merits of the book, published in the fall. I live in New York, so most of the cosmos is invisible to me, but even when I lived under the black crystalline and  at this time of year  head-ringingly cold skies of the Catskills, I could see only so far. If you don’t have your own Hubble Space Telescope, this book is the next best thing.

Mr. Benson has scoured images from the world’s observatories, including the Hubble, to fashion a step-by-step tour of the cosmos, outward from fantastical clusters and nebulae a few hundred light-years away to soft red dots of primordial galaxies peppering the wall of the sky billions of light-years beyond the stars, almost to the Big Bang.