The story of the sun, moon, and stars

And as our journeyings together are for a while to be away from earth, we shall find ourselves obliged to count her as something quite small in the great universe, where so many...

People began very early in the history of the world to pay close attention to the sun. And no wonder. We owe so much to his heat and light that the marvel would be if men had no...

What is it which binds together all the members of the Solar System? Ah, what? Why should not the sun at any moment rush away in one direction, the earth in a second, the planet...

The chief distinction between stars and planets is, as before said, that the stars shine entirely by their own light, while the planets shine chiefly, if not entirely, by reflec...

The distance from the sun which we have now reached is little less than four hundred and fifty millions of miles, or about five times as much as the earth’s distance; and the su...

Come, and let us pay a visit to the moon. We seem to feel a personal interest in her, just because she is, in so peculiar a sense, our own friend and close attendant. The sun sh...

From time to time in past days--and days not very long past either--people were startled by the sight of a long-tailed star, moving quickly across the sky, called a comet. We se...

If you walk out any night after dark, and watch the bright stars shining in a clear sky--shining as they have done for ages past--you will probably see, now and then, a bright p...

We have now to take flight in thought far, far beyond the outskirts of our little Solar System. Yes, our _great_ Solar System, with its mighty sun, its planets, its moons, its c...

I have already spoken about the seeming motions of the stars as a whole, once believed to be real, and now known to be only caused by the motions of our earth. For just as the t...

We have now reached a point where it ought not to be difficult for us to picture to ourselves, with something of vividness, the general outlines of the Solar System. Awhile ago...

A good many explanations have been from time to time offered as to the dark spots seen to move across the face of the sun. Some one or more of these explanations may be true; bu...

Having seen something of storms taking place on the sun’s photosphere, we must next give our attention to storms taking place at his edge. But it should be remembered that the s...

From a globe all fire, all energy, all action, we come to a globe silent, voiceless, changeless, lifeless. So, at least, the moon seems to us. But it will not do to speak too co...

There are two ways of thinking about the moon. One way is to consider her as merely the earth’s attendant satellite. The other way is to consider her as our sister-planet, trave...

Once again we have to journey through the high-roads of the Solar System, paying a brief visit to each in turn of our seven chief brother-and-sister planets, and learning a few...

Passing at one leap over the belt of tiny asteroids, about which we know little beyond their general movement, and the size and weight of a few among them, we reach at once the...

The system of Jupiter is a simple system compared with that of Saturn, next in order. For whereas Jupiter has only five moons, Saturn has eight, and, in addition to these, he ha...

Till the year 1781, Saturn was believed to be the outermost planet of the Solar System, and nobody suspected the fact of two great, lonely brother-planets wandering around the s...

A curious discovery has been lately made. It is that some sort of mysterious tie seems to exist between comets and meteorites. For a long while this was never suspected. How sho...

The three prominent features of comets--a head, nucleus, and tail--are seen only in particular instances. The great majority appear as faint globular masses of vapor, with littl...

Once more we have to wing our flight far, far away from the busy Solar System where we live; away from whirling planets, moons, meteorites, all shining with reflected sunlight;...

In the constellation of the Swan there is a little, dim, sixth-magnitude star, scarcely to be seen without a telescope. This star, 61 Cygni by name, is the first whose distance...

Various in kind, various in size, various in color, various in position, various in motion, are the myriad suns scattered through space. So far are they from being formed on the...

We have been thinking a good deal about single stars and double stars, as seen from earth. Now we have to turn our attention to groups, clusters, _masses_ of stars, in the far r...

At length the sun had fully gained his rightful position in the minds of men as center and controller of the Solar System, and earth was fully dethroned from her old false posit...

Until the days of Sir William Herschel, little attention was bestowed upon the universe of distant stars. Before his advent the interest of astronomers had been mainly centered...

The Milky Way forms a soft band of light round the whole heavens. In the Southern Hemisphere, as in the Northern Hemisphere, it is to be seen. In some parts the band narrows; in...

No rest, no quiet, no repose, in that great universe, which to our dim eyesight looks so fixed and still, but one perpetual rush of moving suns and worlds. For every star has it...

Several times, in the course of this book, mention has been made of a wonderful new instrument called the spectroscope. We now proceed to give a brief account of the origin and...

Photography is not only a useful handmaid to astronomy as a whole, but also it is so, peculiarly, to that division of astronomy with which we are now chiefly concerned--to spect...

The beginnings of astronomy lie in the distance of earliest historical ages. It is no easy matter to say when first, in all probability, this science grew into existence. Astron...

Still, however, the world was not convinced of the truth of the Copernican system. One man here or there saw and acknowledged its reality. The mass of mankind continued firmly t...

Even the great fame of Galileo must be relegated to a second place in comparison with that of the philosopher who first saw the light in a Lincolnshire farmhouse on the 25th of...

Sir William Herschel was born in the city of Hanover, November 15, 1738. He was the second son of Isaac Herschel, a musician, who brought him up, with his four other sons, to hi...