Preface; References; Contents; 1: Reading the Sky; Invoking Buridan's Donkey; Halley's Lucid Spots; Wright's Via Lactea; The Star-Gauging Siblings; It All Begins with M1; The Columns Arrayed Before Us; An Evening with Norton; Further Revelations from Norton; The Gathering of Stars; The Spectra of William Huggins; The View Going Forward; References; 2: In the Eye of the Beholder; Let There Be Light; A Quantum Mechanical Aside; Unweaving Light; The Color of Excitation; Seeing Red in Orion; Tools of the Trade; Colors of the Crab; Coronal Gas and a Cosmic Onion

Pulsars and Free ElectronsReferences; 3: The Dark Clouds Revealed; Kapteyn Tries Again; A System of Stars, or Many Star Systems; Trumpler's Dim View; Baade's Improbable Window; Seeing the Blues; Interstellar Extinction; References; 4: The Hyperfine Split and Atomic Jitters; Star Noise; Dialing Radio HI; The Molecular Giants Emerge; Born of Stardust; The Pillars of Creation; Are GMCs Dangerous?; Life in a Molecular Cloud; References; 5: In the Grip of Gravity; The Life and Times of a Molecular Cloud; Getting to Know the Stars; Making Stars the Lockyer Way; The Jeans Criterion

Young Stellar Objects The Stellar Birth Line; Acquiring Stardom; B2FH; The Engines of Evolution; First and Last; References; 6: It's a Far Flung Life; References; Appendix The Magnitude Scale and Interstellar Extinction; Index