Most of the constellations, the patterns of stars found in the night sky, are connected with the ancient myths which people developed to give meaning to what they saw in the sky, based on the experience of their culture. The ideas of modern astronomy play a similar role for us today. They are like stories which help us understand the phenomena we discover when we look deeper in the sky than is possible with eyes alone. In this book, the ancient sky stories and those of modern astronomy are woven together in a unique way.
Coverage includes twenty-four important constellations as well as the sun and the moon and the sky as a whole. For each of these, one of the old stories is tied together with the astronomical understanding of a key feature of that part of the sky, allowing the one story to serve as a reminder for the other. In this way we encompass all the major ideas of modern astronomy: the birth and death of stars, including supernovas, pulsars, and black holes; the realm of the galaxies with its preponderance of dark matter and where we find regions of extreme violence including the mysterious quasars; and the life cycle of the universe itself.