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Telescopic images taken from
Uranography; or, a Description of the Heavens (1844). Reproductions like these were among the first widely circulated images of celestial bodies beyond the earth. They created a sense among educated nonspecialists of the wonder, strangeness, and variability of cosmic objects. Byron's lyrical description--in Cain (1821)--of the earth seen from outer space represents one of the first poetic attempts to imagine an interplanetary point of view: Is yon our earth? . . . Can it be? Yon small blue circle, swinging in far ether, With an inferior circlet near it still? (II, i) |