The music of the spheres

HOW thrilling to read of great hunts for treasure! Yet the pirates who dug their spades into the earthy loam never cached such jewels as are hidden along the dark slopes of the...

Thus the stars, in unchanging order, rise majestically above the horizon in the east, wend their way across the great expanse of sky above our heads, and disappear below the hor...

IN the vividness of their fancy, intensified by glorious scenery and sunny skies, the ancient Greeks believed that the gods dwelt on the summit of Mount Olympus and that queer a...

A BROKEN handled duplicate of the old fashioned tin dipper that used to hang by the well, lies twinkling in the northern half of the sky. This Dipper is ornamented with seven br...

LIKE the shadow of a dream among the summer stars of the northern sky is a wonderful story of romance and adventure. This story has been mentioned in all Greek literature of the...

ABOUT 9 o'clock on the 8th of April, a large, bright sickle passes near the zenith. This sickle lies just south of the Big Dipper and is a clearly defined figure among the other...

THE above constellations, which lie to either side of the great summer parade of star-figures which crosses the heavenly dome, will be called, for convenience in locating them,...

WITH the exception of the stars in the constellation of Orion,--Spica, Antares, Formalhaut and Sirius are the only stars of the first magnitude south of the celestial equator wh...

OF all the interesting star-scenery that we pass as we travel in our year-long, never-ending path around the sun, the most magnificent and impressive is the figure of the beauti...

ONE of the loveliest, and most amazing, phenomena of the heavens is the Milky Way. In olden times, imagination ran riot as to just what this luminous band of light could be. It...

STARS are suns which lie at such vast distances that they seem no more than twinkling points of light. Through the aid of the spectroscope we have learned a great deal about the...

WE have just obtained a close view of one of the stars of the Galaxy,--the nearest star, our own sun,--and have gazed in admiration at the pearly setting of its corona, the turb...

ALMOST every one knows Venus, the beautiful Evening Star, which is also, by the way, an equally beautiful Morning Star. In ancient times the Greeks believed these to be two diff...

THE orbit of the little planet Mars, 141,000,000 miles from the sun, encompasses the orbits of Earth, Venus and Mercury, and forms the boundary line between the four inner plane...

MERCURY, the smallest and fleetest and hottest of the planets, shines as a star of the first magnitude. It lies closer to the sun than any other planet, which increases the diff...

VOLUMES could not cover the extremely complex history of the earth, nor picture with justice the exquisite construction of even its smallest features. It is here that the astron...

THE moon's diameter is equal to one-fourth that of the earth. As viewed from a nearby planet--neighbor Venus, the planetoids, or neighbor Mars--the moon and the earth would appe...