Astronomy History

Best-selling author and commentator Jay Ingram is back to explain the magic and mysteries of the world around us. Jay takes listeners on a tour of the universe, exploring wonders big and small. From the farthest reaches of space to the most perplexing historical riddles to the marvels of who we are and what we're made of, Jay answers the important questions, such as: What's inside a black hole? Will machines ever learn to feel? And how much pee is in the average pool?

The Short Story of the Universe is a new introduction to the subject of the universe. Covering 130 key components that make it up - from dwarf galaxies and spiral arms to red giants and the planets of the solar system - and linking these to the universe's structure and the theories that help us understand it, this book simplifies this riveting yet mind-boggling subject, telling the story of how it came into being and how it will eventually be no more.

During the summer of 1969 - the summer Americans first walked on the moon - musician and poet Patti Smith recalled strolling down the Coney Island Boardwalk to a refreshment stand, where "pictures of Jesus, President Kennedy, and the astronauts were taped to the wall behind the register." Such was the zeitgeist in the year of the moon. Yet this holy trinity of 1960s America would quickly fall apart.

Travel to and from Mars has long been a staple of science fiction. And yet the hurdles - both technological and financial - have kept human exploration of the red planet from becoming a reality. Trailblazing Mars offers an inside look at the current efforts to fulfill this dream. Award-winning journalist Pat Duggins examines the extreme new challenges that will be faced by astronauts on the journey there and back. They'll have to grow their own food, find their own water - and solve their own problems.

Mars has been a source of fascination and speculation ever since the ancient Egyptians observed its blood-red hue and named it for their god of war and plague. But it wasn't until the 19th century when "canals" were observed on the surface of the Red Planet, suggesting the presence of water, that scientists, novelists, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs became obsessed with the question of whether there's life on Mars. The Big Book of Mars is the most comprehensive look at our relationship with Mars - yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

The question of man’s place in the extended universe has been pondered by every known culture since the beginning of recorded history. Naturally, as technological advances and the creation of flying aircraft became realities, the sighting of UFOs increased, as did the interest in potential contact with aliens. While incidents like the one at Roswell led to conspiracies and a craze among those who insisted the government was hiding proof of extraterrestrials’ existence, governments across the world were actually secretly studying UFO sightings by the mid-20th century.

While modern technology has helped astronomers view the furthest reaches of the Solar System, it has also allowed scientists to start discovering planets orbiting distant stars. To make it easier to assess the relative mass and size of the new planets being discovered, scientists give these measurements as multiples of those properties for either Jupiter or Earth

Every living being throughout history, across time and geography, has gazed up at the same moon. From the first prehistoric life that crawled onto land guided by the power of the tides, to the division of time into months and seasons for the first humans, the moon has driven the expansion and development of our world. Our Moon tells the dazzling story of how the Moon has shaped life as we know it, fuelled dramatic change across the globe and could be the key to humanity's future.

Sarah Cruddas has been looking to the skies her entire life. Her childhood was spent staring at the moon and hearing stories of the space race, and she worked in a fruit factory to fund her love of the subject. Her subsequent career studying astrophysics and becoming a television host and space journalist has seen her report on space exploration and chase launches across the world. In Look Up Sarah explains why she has always been a passionate advocate for why space should matter - to everyone.

When Galileo looked to the sky with his perspicillum, or spyglass, roughly 400 years ago, he could not have fathomed the amount of change his astonishing findings a seemingly flat moon magically transformed into a dynamic, crater-filled orb and a large, black sky suddenly held millions of galaxies would have on civilizations.

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.

The world of science has been transformed. Where once astronomers sat at the controls of giant telescopes in remote locations, praying for clear skies, now they have no need to budge from their desks, as data arrives in their inbox. And what they receive is overwhelming; projects now being built provide more data in a few nights than in the whole of humanities' history of observing the universe.

Today, the Space Race is widely viewed poignantly and fondly as a race to the Moon that culminated with Apollo 11 “winning” the race for the United States. In fact, it encompassed a much broader range of competition between the Soviet Union and the United States that affected everything from military technology to successfully launching satellites that could land on Mars or orbit other planets in the Solar System.

Two questions guide this seven-year project: First, how can we approach the phenomenon, representation, and interpretation of total solar eclipses? Second, how can we heal the historical divide separating the natural sciences from the humanities, arts, history, music, and theology? The result of this interdisciplinary investigation into eclipses is an exciting look behind the scenes—into labs, archives, museums, studies, around fieldwork in astronomy, meteorology, animal behavior, and ecophysiology.

The wonders of the universe never seemed so close. Who named the planets? Why isn't Pluto a planet? And what's the future of space? From ancient cave paintings to flying drones on Mars, humanity's relationship with the skies has changed dramatically. Gazing at the Night Sky looks back at over 5,000 years of history, from ancient Mesopotamian astronomers to the next horizons in space travel.

In 1954, the US Air Force launched an ambitious program known as WS-117L to develop the world's first reconnaissance satellite. The goal was to take photographic images from space and relay them back to Earth via radio. Because of technical issues and bureaucratic resistance, however, WS-117L was seriously behind schedule by the time Sputnik orbited Earth in 1957 and was eventually cancelled. Eyeing the Red Storm examines the birth of space-based reconnaissance from the perspective of WS-117L.

Noah Adams's adventure in search of Wilbur and Orville Wright is a journey that takes him across the country as he follows in the footsteps of the famous brothers in an attempt to know them more deeply, not just as inventors and pilots but as individuals as well.

Humans are pattern-matching creatures, and astrology is our grandest pattern-matching game. In this ingenious work of history, data scientist Alexander Boxer examines a treasure trove of esoteric classical sources to expose the deep imaginative framework by which - for millennia - we made sense of our fates. Astrology, he argues, was the ancient world's most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise sustained by some of history's most brilliant minds, from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler.

With the ongoing advancement of AI and other technologies, our world is becoming increasingly intelligent. From chatbots to innovations in brain-computer interfaces to the possibility of superintelligences leading to the Singularity later this century, our reality is being transformed before our eyes. This is commonly seen as the natural result of progress, but what if there's more to it than that? What if intelligence is an inevitability, an underlying property of the universe?

In 1915, British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington was fascinated with Einstein's new theory of general relativity. The theory talks about how forces push and pull objects in space. Einstein said that the sun's gravity could pull and bend light.