The Children's Book of Stars

I have told you about the four lesser worlds of which our earth is one, and you know that beyond Mars, the last of them, there lies a vast space, in which are found the asteroid...

Our solar system is set by itself in the midst of a great space, and so far as we have learnt about it in this book everything in it seems orderly: the planets go round the sun...

What must the sun appear to Mercury, who is so much nearer to him than we are? To understand that we should have to imagine our sun increased to eight or nine times his apparent...

The earth is not the only world that, poised in space, swings around the sun. It is one of a family called the Solar System, which means the system controlled and governed by th...

So far we have referred to the sun just so much as was necessary to show the planets rotating round him, and to acknowledge him as the source of all our light and heat; but we h...

All the substances which we are accustomed to see and handle in our daily lives belong to our world. There are vegetables which grow in the earth, minerals which are dug out of...

On a clear moonless night the stars appear uncountable. You see them twinkling through the leafless trees, and covering all the sky from the zenith, the highest point above your...

It is a curious fact that when we are used to things, we often do not notice them, and things which we do every day cease to attract our attention. We find an instance of this i...

How can we possibly tell what the stars are made of? If we think of the vast oceans of space lying between them and us, and realize that we can never cross those oceans, for in...

Has it ever occurred to you that the stars are not all of the same colour? It is true that, just glancing at them casually, you might say they are all white; but if you examine...

From the very earliest times men have watched the stars, felt their mysterious influence, tried to discover what they were, and noted their rising and setting. They classified t...

'Once upon a time,' long, long ago, the earth was not a compact, round, hard body such as she is now, but much larger and softer, and as she rotated a fragment broke off from he...

Could you point out any star cluster in the sky? You could if you would only think for a minute, for one has been mentioned already. This is the cluster known as the Pleiades, a...

It is a clear night, nearly all the world is asleep, when an astronomer crosses his lawn on his way to his observatory to spend the dark hours in making investigations into prof...

If you are holding something in your hand and you let it go, what happens? It falls to the ground, of course. Now, why should it do so? You will say: 'How could it do anything e...

You remember we have already remarked upon the difficulty of telling how far one star lies behind another, as we do not know their sizes. It is, to take another similar case, ea...