Astronomy History

As far back as stories go, pioneers have reached for the skies. In the last 200 years, they have mastered the air and made the modern world possible. Reach for the Skies is my look at the history of flight through the stories and people who have inspired me throughout my life. It is a story of pioneers, and of course it includes the world-famous Montgolfiers and the Wright brothers, but I also want to describe some of the lesser-known trailblazers.

Het laatste boek van professor Stephen Hawking. Hoe is alles begonnen? Is er intelligent leven elders in het heelal? Kunnen we de toekomst voorspellen? Bestaat er een God? Wat zit er in een zwart gat? Zijn tijdreizen mogelijk? Zullen we overleven op aarde? Moeten we de ruimte koloniseren? Zal kunstmatige intelligentie slimmer worden dan wij? Hoe geven wij de toekomst vorm? De wereldberoemde wetenschapper en bestsellerauteur Stephen Hawking laat ons zijn laatste ideeën over de grootste vragen van het universum na in dit briljante postuum uitgegeven werk.

Mars - bewilderingly empty, coated in red dust - is an unlikely place to pin our hopes of finding life elsewhere. And yet, right now multiple spacecraft are circling, sweeping over Terra Sabaea, Syrtis Major, the dunes of Elysium and Mare Sirenum - on the brink, perhaps, of a discovery that would inspire humankind as much as any in our history. With poetic precision and grace, Sarah Stewart Johnson traces the evocative history of our explorations of Mars.

When our Milky Way merges with the Andromeda Galaxy in 4.75 billion years, Earth will be facing even bigger problems than a cosmic collision. Two parallel worlds confront an uncertain future, while an astrophilosopher and a modern shaman struggle with decisions that will establish the fate of intelligent beings throughout the colliding spiral arms. Worlds separated by thousands of light-years are suddenly thrust together in challenges humans have never imagined.

From ambitious scientists rising above the clouds to analyse the air to war generals floating across enemy lines, Richard Holmes takes to the air in this heart-lifting history of pioneer balloonists. Falling Upwards asks why they risked their lives and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet. The stories range from early ballooning rivals to the long-distance voyages of American entrepreneurs; from the legendary balloon escape from the Prussian siege of Paris to dauntless James Glaisher, who, in the 1860s, flew seven miles above the earth - without oxygen.

A fascinating piece of historical scientific writing, written in 1913 by E. Walter Maunder (F.R.A.S.), the superintendent of the Solar Dept. at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The book is a snapshot in time showing the evolution of thinking on the solar system and cosmology. The author considers, in fine detail, the plausibility of life on other planets within our solar system, the requirements for such life, and the barriers that life faces.

In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867-1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante's Divine Comedy. Was Dante's astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as insightful as one could be about the sky? As the 20th century began, women who wished to become professional astronomers faced difficult cultural barriers, but Evershed joined the British Astronomical Association and, from an Indian observatory, became an experienced observer of sunspots, solar eclipses, and variable stars.

Every generation has looked up from the Earth and wondered at the beauty of the moon. 50 years ago, a few Americans became the first to do the reverse - with the whole world watching through their eyes. In this short but wide-ranging book, Oliver Morton explores the history and future of humankind's relationship with the moon. A counterpoint in the sky, it has shaped our understanding of the Earth from Galileo to Apollo. Its gentle light has spoken of love and loneliness; its battered surface of death and the cosmic.

Many of us on Earth live in a home with a street address, city, and zip code. But we have another address, which astronomers and astrophysicists refer to as our "cosmic address": Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Local Group, Virgo Supercluster, the Universe. Consider the vast scales that our cosmic address spans. Understandably, it's hard for our brains to truly imagine it. Our galaxy, The Milky Way, is populated with somewhere between 100-400 billion stars, one of which is our Sun, an average, run-of-the-mill star.