Excerpt from A Synopsis of the Elements of Astronomy, and a Description of the Celestial Indicator: Written to Accompany the Apparatus, by the InventorAstronomy is the science which teaches the knowledge of the stars; a study that has at once the beauty of poetry, and the exactness of Geometry. Te look in all directions, on a clear evening, and we see a multitude of stars; were we to remain out all night, we should continue to see them coming up in the east, and going down in the west, until the dawn of morning obscured them from our sight. The sun rises; it is but a star, like those seen in the night and were it as far away from us as the other stars, we should continue to see stars all the time under a clear sky; but, being comparatively near us, it looks large and gives us a flood of light. That makes our day. Its distance is but miles, and its light but eight minutes in reaching us, while the light from the next near est fixed star, at Centauri, is more than three years in reaching us; and the light from some of the remoter fixed stars, that are seen with telescopes, would require a hund red thousand years to travel to us; yet their light is here, and the Beyond - a boundless space - yet filled with stars.We live among the stars and amidst star-systems; yet we see less than with our unaided vision; with the telescope, more than twenty millions.But now we will confine our description to one star, and its planets moving eastward around it. To us it is a sun.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.