Birds of America

Birds of America by John James Audubon is reckoned to be the world's most expensive book and is due to fetch around £6 million when it is auctioned at Sotheby's in London on December 7th.

The reference book contains 435 hand-coloured, life-size prints of 497 bird species and measures 39 by 26 inches. Only 119 copies are known to remain.

Audubon was a French-American ornithologist, naturalist, hunter and painter. He travelled to the UK in 1826 where he became a minor celebrity and raised enough money to begin publishing the drawings he brought with him.

 

Number of the Week: 600 million metric tonnes

The estimated amount of water ice located near the Moon's north pole. The ice was spotted by the American LCROSS satellite aboard the Indian lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-1. The results of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite suggests that "a sustainable human presence on the Moon is possible" according to Paul Spudis from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. President Barack Obama cancelled the American programme for a return to the moon by 2020 in February of this year.

Read more about this story:

LCROSS

Chandrayaan-1