When eight-year-old Greer Donner falls off his horse in the Washington wilderness, he braces himself to face the long hike home alone. But screams pierce the darkness, and he stumbles upon a dead-end road where a man is beating a woman--nearly to death. In a moment of courage, he stops the assault, but he's left to face the man, who turns his wrath into an ominous threat: if the boy ever reveals what he has seen, his family will pay the ultimate price. The secret Greer now carries begins his emotional unraveling. -- amazon.com.

The only work to date to collect data gathered during the American and Soviet missions in an accessible and complete reference of current scientific and technical information about the Moon.

After many decades spent in astronomical semi-obscurity, the Moon has of late suddenly emerged to claim renewed interest on the part of the students of astronomy, as well as of other branches of physical science and technology; and the reasons which brought this about are indeed of historical significance. From time immemorial, astronomy has been debarred from the status of a gen uine experimental science by the utter remoteness of the objects of its study. With the exception of meteors - those small freaks of cosmic matter intercepted by the Earth on its perpetual journey through space - the properties of all celestial bodies outside the gravitational confines of our planet could be studied only at a distance: namely, from the effect of attraction exerted by their masses; or from the ciphered message of their light brought to us by nimble-footed photons across the intervening gaps of space. A dramatic emergence of long-range rockets in the last decade bids fair to bring about a profound change in this situation. On September 13, 1959 - a memorable date in the history of human endeavour - a man-made missile of Russian origin crash landed on the surface of the Moon in the region of its Mare Imbrium, and thus ended the age-long separation of the Earth and its only natural satellite which lasted not less than 4t billion years.

You too can follow in the steps of the great astronomers such as Hipparchus, Galileo, Kepler and Hubble, who all contributed so much to our modern understanding of the cosmos. This book gives the student or amateur astronomer the following tools to replicate some of these seminal observations from their own homes: With your own eyes: Use your own observations and measurements to discover and confirm the phenomena of the seasons, the analemma and the equation of time, the logic behind celestial coordinates, and even the precession of the equinoxes. With a consumer-grade digital camera: Record the changing brightness of an eclipsing binary star and show that a pulsating star changes color as it brightens and dims. Add an inexpensive diffraction grating to your camera and see the variety of spectral features in the stars, and demonstrate that the Sun’s spectrum is similar to one particular type of stellar spectrum. With a backyard telescope: Add a CCD imager and you can measure the scale of the Solar System and the distance to a nearby star. You could even measure the distance to another galaxy and observe the cosmological redshift of the expanding universe. Astronomical Discoveries You Can Make, Too! doesn’t just tell you about the development of astronomy; it shows you how to discover for yourself the essential features of the universe.