 This non-fiction book deals with sky happenings. Profusely illustrated and laced with anecdotes and folk beliefs about comets, eclipses and other sky phenomena, Sky Dragons and Flaming Swords is a science book for the non-science reader and an astronomy book for those who find astronomy hard to grasp. With charts, maps, photos, drawings—facts and figures, too—Marietta Moskin has put together a fanciful book that will delight and inform young readers. To our earliest ancestors, who lived without clocks or calendars, the recurring patterns of the sun, moon and stars served as indicators of the seasons and the hours. These orderly patterns reassured people that all was well in the heavens and therefore on the earth. Unusual changes in the sky, however, were often causes of intense fear that the world might come to an end. Comets, meteors, solar eclipses, meteor showers, lunar eclipses, asteroids, shooting stars and other astronomical phonomena—events that astronomers today can usually predict and explain—took on strange meanings to primitive people and were the source of many superstitions and customs. Sky Dragons and Flaming Swords tells how early people were affected by unusual occurrences in the heavens. It also explains these phenomena to today’s reader and includes related stories and anecdotes as well as maps, old prints, engravings, diagrams and charts. Appendices contain charts showing past and present eclipse paths, safe ways to view eclipses, lists of periodic comets and their dates and major meteor showers. It also contains a glossary and index. |
