À la conquête des étoiles

À la conquête des étoiles is a broad popular science synthesis tracing the history of astronomy from the earliest human observations to the cosmological discoveries of the twentieth century. Organised in nine chapters, the work covers an exceptional chronological arc: from the astral beliefs of early civilisations to the four great Copernican reformers (Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton), from the sky navigators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Huygens, Cassini, Römer, Bradley) to Herschel's exploration of the stellar universe, and finally to the revelation of the deep universe (extragalactic nebulae, Hubble's law of recession). Pierre Rousseau, astronomer and essayist trained at the Meudon Observatory, provides the educated reader with a fluent and rigorous narrative, a state of astronomical knowledge published on the eve of the Space Age, the year before the same author's Satellites artificiels.