Spectacular Images Show How Our View of the Universe Has Evolved

Unveiling The Universe NASA/ESA/The Hubble Heritage Team The human species is ever-changing and with it our view of the universe. By Jeffrey Kluger It’s easy to laugh at the ancient humans who thought of the nighttime sky as a sort of cosmic colander, but the idea made an intuitive kind of sense. In the evening, a gigantic bowl with thousands of pinprick holes is inverted over the Earth—or so the thinking went. The sun, suspended above it all, streams through in a brilliant scattering of starry points. Over the centuries, we slowly came to a clearer understanding of the structure and workings of the universe, thanks to the birth of the telescope and the steady accumulation of human knowledge. The more the stargazers learned, the more they tried to share what they were discovering with the rest of humanity. In the stunning new book Universe: Exploring the Astronomical World, an international panel of academics, artists, astronomers and more have collected a series of engravings, paintings, sketches and photographs, showing how our view of the cosmos has slowly changed. If there is dazzle in the contemporary images, there is a sweet, naïve genius in the earlier ones. All of them reveal a species searching for answers to the grandest celestial questions—and slowly, improbably, succeeding in that quest. OUR SOLAR SYSTEM TO OUR GALAXY Andreas Cellarius Earth-Centered Cosmos (1660): History may not remember much about Andreas Cellarius, who, in 1660, was ...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Eclipse jeff kluger NASA space universe Source Type: news