Curiosities of the Sky

If you are out-of-doors soon after sunset—say, on an evening late in the month of February—you may perceive, just after the angry flush of the dying winter’s day has faded from...

In speaking of Professor Comstock’s extraordinary theory of the Milky Way, the fact was mentioned that, broadly speaking, the nebulæ are less numerous in the galactic belt than...

While it is tacitly assumed that there are planets revolving around other stars than the sun, it would be impossible for us to see them with any telescope yet invented, and no i...

One of the most surprising triumphs of celestial photography was Professor Keeler’s discovery, in 1899, that the great majority of the nebulæ have a distinctly spiral form. This...

Without going back of the nineteenth century we may find records of some of the most extraordinary comets that man has ever looked upon. In 1811, still spoken of as “the year of...

And how as to gravitation? We do not _know_ that gravitation acts beyond the visible universe, but it is reasonable to suppose that it does. At any rate, if we let go _its_ sust...

Temporary stars are the rarest and most erratic of astronomical phenomena. The earliest records relating to them are not very clear, and we cannot in every instance be certain t...

PREFACE CURIOSITIES OF THE SKY I. The Windows of Absolute Night II. Star-Clouds, Star-Clusters, and Star-Streams III. Stellar Migrations IV. The Passing of the Constellations V....

As all the world knows, the sun, a blinding globe pouring forth an inconceivable quantity of light and heat, whose daily passage through the sky is caused by the earth’s rotatio...

The interest excited by the Aurora in scientific circles was greatly stimulated when, in the last half of the nineteenth century, it was discovered that it is a phenomenon intim...

More rare than meteors or falling stars, and more startling, except that they never appear in showers, are the huge balls of fire which occasionally dart through the sky, lighti...

It is not impossible that the moon did at one time have inhabitants of some kind. But, if so, they vanished with the disappearance of its atmosphere and seas, or with the advent...

The whole question of star-drift has lately assumed a new phase, in consequence of the investigations of Kapteyn, Dyson, and Eddington on the “systematic motions of the stars.”...

Nowadays new asteroids are found frequently by photography, but physically they are most insignificant bodies, their average diameter probably not exceeding twenty miles, and so...