Visions of alien planets from Copernicus to Star Wars

Dennis Danielson and Christopher Graney are two of my favourite historians of astronomy. Danielson is the author of the excellent biography of George Joachim Rheticus (1514–1574), The First Copernican: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution (Walker & Company, 2006) and also The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining The Universe From Heraclitus To Hawking (Basic Books, 2001) which I don’t own but which I look at sideways from time to time and think, “that could fill a space on my bookshelf,” but unfortunately I don’t have any space on my bookshelves! Graney is the author of two excellent books outlining the Jesuit contributions to astronomy in the seventeenth century Setting Aside all Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science Against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo (University of Notre Dame Press, 2016) and Mathematical Disquisitions: The Booklet of Theses Immortalized by Galileo (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017). Now these two fine historians have…