This collection brings together 28 of Fernie's Marginalia columns from American Scientist magazine. Published between 1985 and 2001, the articles focus on the history of astronomy, bringing life to many of the people who have sought to explain what we observe above us in the night sky. Fernie recounts the remarkable tales of human adventures, struggle and follies behind some well-known and lesser-known scientific conquests of the past few centuries, such as the contentious discovery of Neptune and the misguided search for Vulcan, a proposed planet between the Sun and Mercury. Several of the articles focus on the characters themselves, such as Edmond Halley of Halley's comet fame, or the obscure Jeremiah Horrocks, who made the first realistic determination of the distance from the Sun to the Earth, as well as a pre-Newtonian suggestion of the existence of an attractive force now known as gravity.