Mapping the Universe The Interactive History of Astronomy

About this book

Mapping the Universe: the Interactive History of Astronomy is the story of man's quest through the ages to unlock the secrets of our universe, understand where we come from and where we are going. Lavishly illustrated throughout, it follows this journey for knowledge from the first musings of Stone Age people on the position of the stars and planets in the sky, to Galileo's first visions of Orion through a telescope, to our first steps on the moon, and right up to the photographs of our magnificent universe which are being sent back from the Plank telescope today.

The book contains several fold-out pages with pockets containing beautifully reproduced documents making it possible for the reader to experience hands-on, and appreciate at each stage, what, over ten thousand years of history, astronomers were discovering, and how and why this was significant.

Contents

- Monuments and Calculators
- Eyes on the Sky
- Patterns in the Sky
- The Earth Centred Universe
- Medieval Astronomy
- Measuring the Skies from the City of the Stars
- Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
- Galileo Galilei
- Cosmographic Mysteries
- New Eyes on the Sky
- Universal Attraction
- New Planets
- The Stars
- The Life of Stars
- The Death of Stars
- New Windows on the Universe
- Exploding Stars
- The Origin of the Chemical Elements
- The Birth of Stars and of Planetary Systems
- Space Exploration
- The Inner Planets
- The Terrestrial Planets
- The Gas Giants
- Planetary Systems Beyond Our Own
- Our Galaxy and Others
- The Universe of Galaxies
- Dark Matter and Dark Energy
- Life in the Universe

Customer Reviews

Biography

Professor Paul Murdin OBE is a senior fellow at the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy and Treasurer of the Royal Astronomical Society. He is a writer, editor and broadcaster, appearing regularly on the BBC and CNN. He has spent over 40 years working as an astronomer in the UK, USA, Australia and Spain and now lives in Cambridge, UK.