Comets, Cosmology and the Big Bang: A history of astronomy from Edmond Halley to Edwin Hubble

For stargazers and science enthusiasts alike, this history of the field of Astronomy follows the lives of its key movers and shakers. The people who opened up God's cosmos. Our knowledge of the universe, from the atomic level to the galactic, changed beyond recognition between the sixteenth century and into the twenty-first. In this book Allan Chapman takes up the story from where he left off in Stargazers, tracing the ground-breaking discoveries and developments of the last three centuries. Besides the big names - Halley, the Herschels, Einstein, Hubble, Hoyle, and Lovell - he includes a host of colourful figures, from wealthy telescope-builders to working-men astronomers, to popular astronomical lecturers, along with the many women, from Caroline Herschel to Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who made fundamental discoveries. He also discusses humanity's perennial fascination with aliens and life on other worlds. He then turns to the great observatories of the United States, Jodrell Bank, the 'space race', and the explosion of interest in astronomy that followed Sir Patrick Moore's first appearance on The Sky at Night in 1957. This book will take the story of astronomy on from where Allan Chapman left it in Stargazers, and bring it almost up to date, with the developments and discoveries of the last three centuries. He covers the big names - Halley, Hooke, Herschel, Hubble and Hoyle; and includes the women who pushed astronomy forward, from Caroline Herschel to the Victorian women astronomers. He includes the big discoveries and the huge ideas, from the Milky War, to the Big Bang, the mighty atom, and the question of life on other planets. And he brings in the contributions made in the US, culminating in their race with the USSR to get a man on the moon, before turning to the explosion of interest in astronomy that was pioneered by Sir Patrick Moore and The Sky at Night.