The System of the Stars

A popular survey of the progress of sidereal astronomy in the nineteenth century containing some of the earliest published astrophotographs.

Agnes Mary Clerke (Author)

9781108014168, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 June 2010

464 pages, 6 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 2.6 cm, 0.59 kg

Agnes Mary Clerke (1842–1907) published The System of the Stars in 1890 when she was a well-established popular science writer. The volume was intended to bring the educated public up to date with the progress made during the nineteenth century in the field of sidereal astronomy. The work was one of the first publications to be illustrated with astrophotography: it contains five astronomical photographs of nebulae. Such photographs had significant impact on the reception and popular acceptance of astrophotography as scientific data. In The System of the Stars, Clerke used the photographs to argue that the natural beauty and symmetry of the universe, displayed by astrophotography, proved the existence of a creator. The work is an important piece of popular Victorian scientific literature, and remains significant today in the context of the nineteenth-century intellectual debates on the relationship between the sciences and religious belief.

1. The task of sidereal astronomy
2. The methods of sidereal research
3. Sirian and solar stars
4. Stars with banded spectra
5. Gaseous stars and nebulae
6. Sidereal evolution
7. Temporary stars
8. Variable stars of long period
9. Variable stars of short period
10. The colours of the stars
11. Double stars
12. Variable double stars
13. Stellar orbits
14. Multiple stars
15. The Pleiades
16. Star clusters
17. The forms of nebulae
18. The great nebulae
19. The nature and changes of nebulae
20. The distances of the stars
21. Translation of the solar system
22. The proper motions of the stars
23. The Milky Way
24. Status of the nebulae
25. The construction of the heaves
Appendix
Index.

Subject Areas: Cosmology & the universe [PGK]