The Story of the Heavens

Sir Robert Ball wrote for readers with no telescope and no mathematics, walking them through the solar system one body at a time: the Sun, the Moon, and each of the planets known in his day, then outward to comets, meteor showers, double stars, distant suns, and the faint band of the Milky Way. He explains how astronomers measure distances, how gravitation binds the whole system together, and how the science came to know what it knows, pausing along the way to weigh the old question of whether other worlds might hold life. First published in 1885 and heavily illustrated, it was among the most widely read popular astronomy titles of the Victorian age. The book survives as a clear, engaging record of the night sky as nineteenth-century science understood it.