This lively and comprehensive book charts the developments in the history of western astronomy from prehistoric times, when farmers used the stars to predict the start of the seasons, through the merging of Babylonian and Greek astronomy, and on to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century applications of Newton`s law. Ending his history in the middle of the nineteenth century with the rise of astrophysics, Michael Hoskin looks at the achievements of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Halley, and Newton, whilst touching upon the first exciting post-war explorations of the universe of stars.