Two new books explore the history and culture of the moon and the sun

Think back to that one magical night in your youth, when the moon was full and he or she was there. Alternatively, think about all those beautiful days when the sky was blue, the sun was shining and everything about the world seemed right. If either of these thoughts brings a smile to your lips, then you have firsthand evidence of the importance of the sun and the moon in our lives. Even in our technological age, we retain a primal connection to these bodies, the two brightest objects in our sky. It is that primal interest, in the end, that is the theme of these two books.

Although the books are written by different authors, they follow a similar path. Each tries to touch on every aspect of the heavenly body it explores, from the role of the body in culture to the latest scientific findings. As befits the size of its subject, "Chasing the Sun" is the larger of the two, weighing in at 517 pages of text plus copious notes and bibliographic references.

Richard Cohen spent no less than eight years traveling around the world, following the sun, as it were, while he researched his book. Consequently, the story is interspersed with what can only be called a solar travelogue: a midnight hike up Mount Fuji to see the sunrise on the solstice and a viewing of the sunrise in the holy city of Varanasi on the Ganges, for example.

By far the most interesting of the adventures was his participation in the first viewing of a solar eclipse from Antarctica in 2003. Deposited on the ice with some hours to spare, the group passed the time listening to a violin concert by one of their number, a member of the Scottish Symphony Orchestra. At one point, a couple - an American businessman and a "svelte, dark-haired Parisian lawyer … in just a purple slip and ski boots" - came out and did a "surprisingly sensuous" tango with only the endless expanse of Antarctica for a backdrop. What a way to celebrate an eclipse!

In between these adventures, Cohen takes us on an exhaustive tour of the role the sun has played in folklore and the slow, gradual growth of scientific understanding of our nearest star.

In the first section, "The Sun Before Science," we encounter phenomena connected to the sun, such as the seasons, the passing of the day and solar eclipses. Cohen supplies us with a large collection of the folklore associated with each of these. (Did you know that the world's tallest sundial is a Redding, Calif., bridge designed by Santiago Calatrava?) He then goes through the usual suspects, from the Greeks to Copernicus and beyond, to show how humans "discovered" the sun.

Along the way we hear how an errant sunbeam cost him a fencing championship (saber) in the 1994 Commonwealth Games: Facing one of the best Canadian fencers, Cohen says he scored what should have been the winning point, which would have guaranteed him a medal. The official, who happened to be Canadian, claimed that the sun had prevented him from seeing what Cohen said was the decisive point. "As the setting sun was behind him," Cohen remarks, "this was a difficult decision to accept." Makes you long for instant replay, doesn't it?

It is completely in keeping with the eclectic nature of the book that it includes a list of the top 10 places in the world to view the sunset. (The island of Santorini in the Aegean tops the list; Key West comes in 10th.) He closes the story, appropriately enough, with a discussion of our best guess as to how the sun will end its life, billions of years from now.

In Bernd Brunner's slimmer volume dealing with the moon, we are plunged immediately into a fascinating tour of the moon in ancient cultures. It surprised me to learn that in many cultures the moon was thought of as a masculine deity, rather than the feminine moon goddess. In some of them, the moon actually took precedence over the sun as an object of worship. There is a good discussion of the lunar calendar, in which each month is reckoned from the first new moon, and the remnants of that way of keeping time that persist to the present: the fact that Easter occurs on a different day every year, for example.

Maps of the moon began appearing as soon as telescopes became available, with the most famous early incident being Galileo's discovery that the moon was not a perfect crystal sphere but had mountains and valleys like the Earth. This contributed to the undermining of old Greek notions of the perfection of the heavens and, ultimately, to the acceptance of the idea that the Earth moves in orbit around the sun, rather than vice versa. We learn that the American geologist Eugene Shoemaker, who pioneered the study of craters on the Earth and moon, is the only human interred on the latter body, his ashes having been deposited there by a NASA spacecraft in 1998.

Brunner spends a lot of time describing various trips to the moon as explored by science fiction writers and talks about what was, to me, the most fascinating tidbit in either of these books.

It turns out that in 1968, the now-defunct Pan American World Airways opened registration for the First Moon Flights Club, essentially starting a waiting list for trips to our satellite. Fully 90,000 people signed up for membership in the club; flights were scheduled to start in 2000. (Ronald Reagan was given a membership card.) I guess those were more hopeful times than our own.

So what are we to make of these two unusual books? They are both well written, both full of fascinating bits of information. I don't think either is meant to be read straight through, though. Instead, by browsing through chapters of interest you will come away with a new appreciation of our heavenly neighbors.

Trefil is the Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Physics at George Mason University. He is working on an illustrated guide to the universe.