Astronomy History

This book includes key presidential speeches on the exploration of space from President Kennedy to President Trump. It includes the fascinating speech that Nixon had written, and subsequently recorded, but fortunately never delivered. The speech was in the event that the Apollo 11 mission did not succeed. Others include Kennedy's bold 1961 speech setting out the goal of sending a man to the moon, which was then achieved within the decade.

George Churchill Kenney (1889-1977) was a United States Army Air Force general during World War II. Kenney's work narrates the remarkable life of Paul Irvin “Pappy” Gunn and his exploits during the Second World War. Gunn was an integral part of the war effort in the Pacific during WWII. Besides being a brilliant pilot, he was a formidable aviation engineer, a mechanical genius who could rebuild anything from an electric razor to an airplane engine or any of the plane’s hundreds of accessories.

Het laatste boek van professor Stephen Hawking. Hoe is alles begonnen? Is er intelligent leven elders in het heelal? Kunnen we de toekomst voorspellen? Bestaat er een God? Wat zit er in een zwart gat? Zijn tijdreizen mogelijk? Zullen we overleven op aarde? Moeten we de ruimte koloniseren? Zal kunstmatige intelligentie slimmer worden dan wij? Hoe geven wij de toekomst vorm? De wereldberoemde wetenschapper en bestsellerauteur Stephen Hawking laat ons zijn laatste ideeën over de grootste vragen van het universum na in dit briljante postuum uitgegeven werk.

Many of us on Earth live in a home with a street address, city, and zip code. But we have another address, which astronomers and astrophysicists refer to as our "cosmic address": Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Local Group, Virgo Supercluster, the Universe. Consider the vast scales that our cosmic address spans. Understandably, it's hard for our brains to truly imagine it. Our galaxy, The Milky Way, is populated with somewhere between 100-400 billion stars, one of which is our Sun, an average, run-of-the-mill star.

The question of man’s place in the extended universe has been pondered by every known culture since the beginning of recorded history. Naturally, as technological advances and the creation of flying aircraft became realities, the sighting of UFOs increased, as did the interest in potential contact with aliens. While incidents like the one at Roswell led to conspiracies and a craze among those who insisted the government was hiding proof of extraterrestrials’ existence, governments across the world were actually secretly studying UFO sightings by the mid-20th century.

Thanks to ancient Greece, we know more about philosophy, politics, the democratic system, mythology, art, the Olympics, and many, many lingual references imbedded in almost every European language. Ancient Greece has had a significant impact on many concepts we still hold true today.

In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867-1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante's Divine Comedy. Was Dante's astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as insightful as one could be about the sky? As the 20th century began, women who wished to become professional astronomers faced difficult cultural barriers, but Evershed joined the British Astronomical Association and, from an Indian observatory, became an experienced observer of sunspots, solar eclipses, and variable stars.