Astronomy: The Science of the Heavenly Bodies

Photo, Mt. Wilson Solar Observatory An Active Prominence of the Sun, 140,000 Miles High, photographed July 9, 1917.

The Science of the Heavenly Bodies
Director Emeritus, Amherst College Observatory
NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS MCMXXII

Copyright 1922 By P. F. Collier & Son Company MANUFACTURED IN U. S. A.

Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the eminent mathematician of Dublin, has, of all writers ancient and modern, most fittingly characterized the ideal science of astronomy as man's golden chain connecting the heavens to the earth, by which we learn the language and interpret the oracles of the universe.
The oldest of the sciences, astronomy is also the broadest in its relations to human knowledge and the interests of mankind. Many are the cognate sciences upon which the noble structure of astronomy has been erected: foremost of all, geometry and the higher mathematics, which tell us of motions, magnitudes and distances; physics and chemistry, of the origin, nature, and destinies of planets, sun, and star; meteorology, of the circulation of their atmospheres; geology, of the structure of the moon's surface; mineralogy, of the constitution of meteorites; while, if we attack, even elementally, the fascinating, though perhaps forever unsolvable, problem of life in other worlds, the astronomer must invoke all the resources that his fellow biologists and their many-sided science can afford him.
The progress of astronomy from age to age has been far from uniform—rather by leaps and bounds: from the earliest epoch when man's planet earth was the center about which the stupendous cosmos wheeled, for whom it was created, and for whose edification it was maintained—down to the modern age whose discoveries have ascertained that even our stellar universe, the vast region of the solar domain, is but one of the thousands of island universes that tenant the inconceivable immensities of space.