The universe has always been there, kind of, but it took intelligent life on earth billions of years to start to grapple with its nature. Carolyn Collins Peterson is a science writer who charts the progress of astronomy through the observatories used throughout history, from the earliest such as Stonehenge, to places like Birr Castle with its Leviathan telescope used by Herschel. 

As always the compressed timescale of the major discoveries in astronomy left me amazed. in just a few generations we have gone from squinting at the nearest celestial bodies to sending manmade objects beyond our solar system. 

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