Astronomy for Amateurs

The crimson Sun sinks beneath the sea, leaving waves streaked with gold and silver. Then, one by one, the stars kindle—“innumerable eyes” opening on the night.

Writing in the early twentieth century, Camille Flammarion asks us to do more than admire the sky: to learn what those distant lights are, and where we stand among them. With the sea still dark beneath the crescent Moon and Venus shining low in the west, he turns the night into an invitation to inquiry. Astronomy, he insists, need not be a maze of figures; it can reveal a universe more marvelous than any earthly spectacle, and show that our own planet is one world among many. But if the heavens are no vault above us, what are they—and what does it mean to belong to them?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.