"Age of Wonder"

[fiefoe]

The star-gazers:

• (James Ferguson) would take a blanket out into the fields.. and lie on his back measuring star distances and patterns with beads on a string held up over his head.
• William Herschel.. found a lucrative position in the famous Pump Room Band (in Bath.)
• A short-sighted person can see these rainbow aberrations of starlight with the naked eye, because his pupil is also distorted at the edges.
• He had the courage, the wonder and the imagination of a refugee.
• Conventional 18th-century astronomers still studied the night sky as if it were... the interior surface of a decorated dome, inlaid with constellations.
• (On the brother-sister pair:) As William would observe, it was not always self-evident which was the planet and which was the moon.
• Bonnycastle: "Astronomy.. opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost. Surrounded by infinite space, and swallowed up in an immensity of being, man seems but as a drop of water in the ocean, mixed and confounded with the general mass."
• Herschel replied crisply that it took all of three seconds (for a star so highly magnified to move through the viewing field of his telescope), and he could follow such a star very well.
• Caroline: "minding the heavens"
• (After being hooked on a wooden stake:) "I was obliged to be my own surgeon by applying acquabaseda and tying a kerchief about it for some days."
• Herschel's proposal was based on his new method of 'gauging' the number of stars in any direction as seen from the earth, and then deducing from the different densities observed the likely shape of the (Milky Way) as it would be seen looking 'inwards' from another galaxy.
• The great forty-foot: "It was a mighty bewilderment of slanted masts, spars and ladders and ropes, from the midst of which a vast tube, looking as if it might be a piece of ordinance such as the revolted Angels battered the wall of Heaven with, according to Milton, lifted its mighty muzzle defiantly to the sky."
• Herschel succeeded in measuring raised temperatures above the visible spectrum of solar light.. He had discovered the presence of infra-red light.
• Hubble: "Our stellar system is a swarm of stars isolated in space. It drifts through the universe as a swarm of bees drifts through the summer air."

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