Astronomy of To-day

Ordinary reasoning, familiar comparisons and pictures are Cecil Goodrich Julius Dolmage's tools for explaining the sky. This popular introduction traces changing ideas about the universe before turning to the solar system, eclipses, telescopes, spectrum analysis, comets and stars. Its preface promises to put astronomical facts and theories into everyday language, with diagrams that can be understood on their own. The contents place accounts of earlier observation beside discussions of celestial distances and the wider stellar universe.

The discussion of Mars shows how the book connects observation with interpretation. Surface markings, seasonal polar caps and the planet's rotation lead into the explanations astronomers then proposed. Another passage considers how the small body Eros helps determine the distance to the Sun. Readers interested in the history of science can follow both the methods of observation and the assumptions behind this early twentieth-century account.