What we see when we bother to look up has inspired humanity for as far back as recorded history. Indeed, it has recently been surmised that forty-thousand-year-old cave paintings throughout Europe show that our distant ancestors tracked the stars. From poets to philosophers, theologians to scientists, we have found in the universe provocations for awe, action, and the advancement of civilization. It was the nascent field of astronomy, after all, that was the impetus for the scientific revolution of Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton that removed the Earth from the center of
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