Long Night Tee Cropped

On a frosty East Midlands morning, when Agnes Giberne was but seven or eight years old, she asked her father why it wasn’t warmer. She already knew, after all, that the Sun was some three million miles nearer in winter than during the summer months. Sitting across from a roaring fire in the hearth, her father pointed to a fly on his knee and replied with his own question: “See — if that fly were one inch nearer to the fire, would it feel any hotter?”

Distance — immeasurable, humbling, stupefying distance — is the leitmotif of Agnes Giberne’s 1879 Sun, Moon, and Stars: A Book for Beginners. This text is less a Victorian astronomy primer than the foundation for a phenomenological star wisdom. 

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