1. Ancient Egyptian sky magic; 2. The origin of the zodiac; 3. The basic astronomy of Stonehenge; 4. Some puzzles of Ptolemy's star catalog; 5. Ptolemy and the maverick motion of Mercury; 6. How astronomers finally captured Mercury; 7. Islamic astronomy; 8.

The astronomy of Alfonso the Wise; 9. From Aristarchus to Copernicus; 10. The Great Copernicus Chase; 11. The Tower of the Winds and the Gregorian calendar; 12. Tycho Brahe and the Great Comet of 1577; 13. Galileo and the phases of Venus; 14. The Galileo affair; 15. Johannes Kepler and the Rudolphine Tables; 16.

An astrolabe from Lahore; 17. Fake astrolabes; 18. Newton, Halley and the comet; 19. Eighteenth-century eclipse paths; 20. The 1784 autobiography of William Herschel; 21. The great comet that never came; 22. Unlocking the chemical secrets of the cosmos; 23. The discovery of the satellites of Mars; 24.

The first photograph of a nebula; 25. The great comet and the Carte; 26. James Lick and the founding of Lick Observatory; 27. Atget's eclipse watchers; 28. Faintness means farness; 29. The mysterious nebulae 1610-1924; 30. Harlow Shapley and the Cepheids; 31. A search for Russell's original diagram; 32.

Dreyer and Tycho's world system; 33. Robert Trumpler and the dustiness of space; 34. The discovery of the spiral arms of the Milky Way; 35. The great comet of 1965; 36. Albert Einstein: a laboratory in the mind.