Sad news for astronomy buffs: The famous radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico — the largest of its kind on planet Earth, it was featured in the film Contact — is in danger of being shut down. Oh, it still works just fine, but the National Science Foundation, a U.S. federal agency, is considering cutting its funding. As Wired notes, the Arecibo facility “recorded the first planets beyond the solar system and helped detect lakes of hydrocarbons on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.”

Arecibo has contributed tremendously to our understanding of the univserse, but for a look at what our knowledge of the stars was like before radio astromy came along, check out A History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler, by Danish astronomer and a historian of astronomy J.D.E. Dreyer. More than a century after its first publication in English, this remains a helpful and readable introduction to historical astronomy. Beginning with humanity’s first attempts to understand our place in the universe and continuing through the age of Isaac Newton, Dreyer connects modern astronomers to those who laid the groundwork before them.

(Also check out The Story of the Stars, George Frederick Chambers’ 1895 primer on skywatching; its Victorian charm and poetical bent will remind you of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, and it’s a treat for fans of the night sky.)

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