大象传媒

Heather Couper presents an omnibus edition of her major new narrative history of astronomy.

Since the dawn of modern humans more than 100,000 years ago, people have been looking into the sky in wonder. They have mapped and measured the heavens and slowly come to understand what they represent.

Much ancient mythology is based on the constellations in the sky, and astrologers have attempted to fit the Earth and themselves into the cosmic scheme of things. The rising and setting of the Sun dominated people's lives and they were dependent on the seasons for their livelihoods. In ancient civilisations, from Babylon to China, events in the sky were linked with what would otherwise seem to be random natural disasters and good or bad fortune. But the monitoring of the skies by astrologers produced some of the earliest accurate astronomical records, recording eclipses, comets and exploding stars thousands of years before our scientific era.