Description: A chance conversation and a surprising motto penned into a sixteenth-century astronomy classic prompted Owen Gingerich to begin his Great Copernicus Chase - a search for all existing copies of Copernicus' monumental De Revolutionibus. This adventure is the subject of the title essay in this collection of 36 episodes in the history of astronomy. Gingerich visits an amazing variety of geographical and chronological settings: the Alexandria of Aristarchus and Archimedes, Mogul India, Renaissance Rome, seventeenth-century London, Penobscot Bay, modern observatories of California, and Albert Einstein's "laboratory of the mind", among others. Originally he described these explorations in articles for Sky & Telescope, Scientific American, and other periodicals. They are collected here in popularly written and well-illustrated chapters which explore the origin of the zodiac, the secrets of detecting fake astrolabes, how optical astronomers beat radio astronomers in the race to discover the spiral arms of our Milky Way, and much more. Gingerich even provides a 'Stonehenge decoder' to allow you to illustrate seasonal sunrise alignments. Owen Gingerich's adventures in the history of astronomy are driven by a passionate interest in the nature of science, a love of travel, photography, and old books, and a journalist's flair for a good story. Trained as an astrophysicist, his research has ranged from the theoretical computation of stellar spectra to an annotated census of the first two printed editions of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus. Gingerich is Professor of Astronomy and History of Science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and currently chairs Harvard's History of ScienceDepartment.

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