Dreams of an astronomer

IT WAS at Venice. The lofty windows of the ancient Ducal Palace of the Speranzi opened upon the Grand Canal. The orb of night was mirrored in the waters by a furrow of silver sp...

I found myself as an observer of the world as it was 100 million years ago, inhabiting a planet in attendance upon one of those distant stars of space, in the middle of a sidere...

ONCE upon a time, in a solar system belonging to the constellation Andromeda, a planet a million times the size of our Earth bore on its surface a very advanced human race. The...

IT was Homer who, 3,000 years ago, saluted Venus as the most beautiful of stars. Who has not been struck with her wonderful brilliance? Who can refrain, when she shines so marve...

THE inhabitants of the Earth are at last beginning to take some interest in the sky. Tired of living as blind strangers to their own country, they are beginning to know that the...

EVERYBODY notices, year by year, in a southerly direction, a bright star which half the spectators believe to be the evening star, but which so far from being Venus, is its very...

ACROSS 92 million miles of space the magnetic pulses of the solar heart are transmitted to the earth, and they make the small and light compass needle, ever trembling and seekin...

THAT in a future, which is perhaps not very far distant, say in a century or two, the inhabitants of our planet might enter into optical, electrical, or telepathic communication...

LAST night in the calm silence of midnight, while all nature slept, I observed in the telescope a small fixed star lost in the multitude of the heavenly host, a pale star of the...

WE have a tendency to remain geometric and anthropocentric and to believe that everything is created on the terrestrial model. Not long ago, at one of the scientific soirées of...