Shadow on the Moon: A Child's Guide to the Discovery of the Solar System

Is the earth flat, a square, or a sphere? Geocentric or heliocentric? How do we know? Using rhyme and imaginative illustrations, Shadow on the Moon takes children on a scientific journey from Aristotle and Aristarchus, through Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Galileo, to Kepler and Newton.

Among the most profound advances in all of science is the suggestion, by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, that the sun, rather than the earth, is the center of the universe. His heliocentric model upended the Ptolemaic view of an earth-centered universe that had held sway for nearly 1400 years. Worse still, it contradicted Aristotle, and thus was considered heretical by some. But the so-called heresies didn t start or stop there. In the third century BCE, two millennia before Copernicus, Aristarchus challenged Aristotle's geocentric model of the universe. And a century after Copernicus, using data collected by Tycho Brahe, Kepler proposed a new model that abandoned Aristotle's perfect circles in favor of-perish the thought!-an ellipse.

Just how did this story play out over 2000 years? And what were the key contributions along the way? Through visuals that set the stories in their time and place and models of the solar system that evolve page by page, Shadow on the Moon invites parents and children to share the process of discovery.

Char Matejovsky is Managing Editor for books and journals at Polebridge Press. A recipient of the Outstanding Achievement in Songwriting Award from the Great American Song Contest (2004), she has a B.A from the University of Montana, USA and a French Language Certificate from the University of Paris, Sorbonne, France. She is the author of Stones & Bones: A Child's Guide to Evolution (2007).