Star Struck: One Thousand Years of the Art and Science of Astronomy - Hardcover

Brashear, Ronald; Lewis, Daniel; Gingerich, Owen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0295980966 ISBN 13: 9780295980966

Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr, 2001

Synopsis

The night sky has always fascinated artists and scientists, awed by its beauty and perplexed by its meaning. Star Struck illustrates some of the rarest and most beautiful books in the history of astronomy, drawn from the Huntington Library's collections and supplemented with Hubble Telescope deep field images supplied by NASA and with illuminated manuscripts from the J. Paul Getty Museum.

The history of astronomy is marked with observations that failed to conform to philosophical beliefs and with the social, political, and spiritual collisions these inconsistencies brought. The ancient Greeks knew the Earth must dominate the universe, but their observations of irregular planetary movements did not easily confirm their conviction. Nicholas Copernicus, an official of the Catholic Church in Poland, articulated a theory of a heliocentric universe--but he did so cautiously, publishing his work in the year he died in 1543. More than a half-century later, Galileo looked at the Moon through one of the earliest telescopes and used this new perspective to defend the Copernican model, for which he spent the last decade of his life in prison. The copy of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus now in the Huntington's collections was once owned by Edwin Hubble, who made extraordinary discoveries 75 years ago while perusing the night skies from California's Mount Wilson Observatory.

About this title

About the Author

Ronald Brashear is rare books curator at the Smithsonian Institution's Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology. Daniel Lewis is curator of American historical manuscripts at the Huntington Library.

Reviews

Adult/High School-This gorgeous title includes the finest in scientific writing, illustrating (more than 150 pictures), and publishing, spanning the earliest copied books to images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Put together by curators from the Smithsonian's Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology and from the Huntington Library, the book is divided into sections on representing the heavens, technologies of observation, and encounters with the planets and outer-space phenomena. Many of the visuals are reproduced as full-page images, making it easier to appreciate the complexity and craftsmanship of early bookmaking, hand illustration, and printing, and also making the original languages of the volumes evident. Although the text is an in-depth overview of astronomy, the out-of-this-world pictures make this book a great introduction to the discipline with particular appeal to nonscientists or science-wary readers.

Sheryl Fowler, Chantilly Regional Library, VA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0295980966
• ISBN 13: 9780295980966
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144