“Day breaks over Mercury in a white heat.”

    Notes from Dava Sobel, The Planets (New York: Penguin, 2006):   “I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral,” says an epigraph opening Ptolemy’s great astronomical treatise, the Almagest, “but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch earth with […]