A short history of astronomy

The author devotes his first three chapters to pre-Copernican astronomy, covering primitive views, the speculations of the Greek astronomers from Thales and Pythagoras to Hipparchus and Ptolemy, and the 900-year near-stagnation of the Middle Ages. Individual chapters covering both the lives and work of astronomy's great names -- Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler and Newton -- follow, will full discussions of the "De revolutionibus", the major telescopic discoveries, Newton's "Principia", the reception of and religious opposition to their revolutionary theories. The next section of the book is an unusually detailed treatment of post-Newtonian achievements: Halley's catalogues, Bradley's discovery of aberration and mutation, the mathematical contributions of Euler, d'Alembert, Lagrance and Laplace toward the solution of the problem of three bodies, the nebular hypothesis, and other advances in the observational and descriptive astonomy of the solar system. The final section is in large part a fascinating record of the shift of interest from the solar system to interstellar space: Herschel's great catalogues, the discovery of double stars, instrumental advances, Bessel's tables, the discovery of Nepture, tidal theory, the discovery of the asteroids, spectrum analysis, stellar photometry, theories on the development of the solar system and the birth of the moon and many similar topics.