Recensori in anteprima

A wondrous tale of cosmic exploration and the colorful characters who ushered astronomy into the modern age The unsung pioneers of modern astronomy were self-funded amateurs. In the span of just decades at the turn of the twentieth-century, they transformed an art of visual observation and geometric reasoning into a hard science grounded in measurement. The new technologies they perfected—photography, celestial spectroscopy, and large-aperture telescopes—have changed the way we understand our universe. Early praise for Starlight Detectives “Beautifully written, Starlight Detectives reminds us how the wonders of the modern universe would never have been possible without the ingenious advances made by pioneering scientists in the nineteenth century. They were the ones who first learned how to read the messages hidden within a star’s radiations. With his poetic eye on the nighttime sky, Alan Hirshfeld engagingly shows how science arrived, step by step, at its revolutionary discovery that we live in but one galaxy amid multitudes flying outward in an expanding universe. A must-read for astronomy and history of science aficionados alike.” —MARCIA BARTUSIAK, author of The Day We Found the Universe and Archives of the Universe