"Stories of Starland" Gallery

A picture of a child from inside the front cover of the book. This picture was meant to entice children into learning about a subject that could potentially fascinate them. The moon, a globe, and a telescope are all featured prominently.

An illustration of a model showing the day and night cycle of the Earth. This illustration takes a large system and normalizes it to something easily understandable and manipulatible by children.

An illustration depicting the size of the Earth relative to the Sun. It gives a broad understanding of just how enormous the sun is compared to the Earth and also how large the orbit of the moon is. These help impress on children the scale of the solar system.

An illustration of the Sun and its accretion disk at the formation of the Solar System. Children would very likely have trouble with understanding a written description of the formation of the planets from the Sun's accretion disk and this illustration helps show that concept.

A diagram of the Solar System including the discovered planets, a few moons, and a comet. This illustration functions as an overview of the Solar System and shows where planets are relative to each other. It also shows a comet with its elliptical orbit, illustrating its difference to the planets.

The illustrator's interpretation of the face of the moon. It has craters and valleys shown in sharp relief to emphasize them. It also illustrates the dark side of the moon, which would remain a mystery to humanity until the 1960s.

An image providing scale for the size of the Sun and the larger planets. The scales of these celestial objects are very hard to grasp but this illustration helps to convey their enormity to children.

An illustration of a comet. This picture depicts comets as they are: small rocks with a tails of vapor streaming behind them. The tail appears curved to observers but it always points in a straight line away from the sun.

A picture of the constellation Ursa Major, also known as the Great Bear. This drawing shows one of the most visible constellations in the night sky, one that children can easily identify using the drawing. It has the primary stars labeled and includes the section known as the Big Dipper.

An illustration of the Great Lick Refractor Telescope at Lick Observatory. This was meant to impress upon children the size of the objects humanity uses to obeserve the heavans and to get them interested in stargazing themselves.

A selection of images from Mary Proctor's Stories of Starland.

Mary Proctor was an astronomer and author born in Dublin, Ireland. She immigrated to America in 1882 and wrote numerous articles and books about astronomy. She has a crater on the moon named after her.

Stories of Starland was published in 1898 and was written with kids in mind. It teaches children about astronomy and includes information on the planets and constellations. The illustrations included in this collection portray the various concepts Proctor intended to convey to children. Many of these concepts are things that children often have trouble comprehending such as the scale of planets and the sun. The purpose of this exhibit is to showcase how these illustrations were used to broaden the minds of children.