Includes bibliographical references (pages 181-206) and index.
Contents:
Preface: The dawn-light of Ravenna -- On the hilltop -- To the lighthouse -- The city of stars -- Poetry and sunspots -- "Black star-lore" -- Physical astronomy -- Romantics -- Prisms -- The notebook of the sun -- The gift of the forest -- The scarcity of wasps in Kashmir -- Harmonic structures -- "Dante and the early astronomers" -- Sun-chasers -- Exploding the sun -- Saturnalia -- Infinity and the fly -- Wallal -- Departure -- Who's who in the moon -- The Maunder minimum -- The remade universe -- Return to origins -- Northern lights -- Epilogue: Kodai dusk.
Summary:
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 twentieth 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. From the perspective of one remarkable amateur astronomer, readers will see how ideas developed during Galileo's time evolved or were discarded in Newtonian conceptions of the cosmos and recast in Einstein's theories. The result is a book about the history of science but also a poetic meditation on literature, science, and the evolution of ideas.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.