Through Magic Glasses and Other Lectures

Moonlight turns the instruments in a turret observatory into weird, gaunt skeletons as a clockwork telescope tracks the full moon toward an eclipse. Below, boys lie awake with telescopes hidden in their dormitories, waiting for the clock to strike.

In late-nineteenth-century England, a scientist known to his pupils as the Magician teaches working lads to uncover nature’s secrets with telescope, spectroscope and microscope. Tonight, he watches for a total lunar eclipse—and a star set to vanish behind the moon’s dark rim, then flash into view again. He longs to share the sight with his students, whose own preparations suggest they may not wait for an invitation. From the distant heavens to the minute wonders hidden under glass, Buckley’s sequel to The Fairyland of Science turns discovery into an adventure in looking closer. What will the Magician and his pupils see when the shadow crosses the moon?

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