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Robert Hooke: the man who knew everything
Neither the smallest nor the largest objects in the known Universe escaped the brilliant Hooke's attention.
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The Herschel family and the Royal Observatory
Meet the Herschels, a remarkable family of amateur astronomers
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Elizabeth I's Royal Wardrobe
Queen Elizabeth I was very conscious of her appearance, and her image was engineered to convey wealth, authority and power.
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What is our closest galaxy?
The unimaginably large Sun is just one of 200,000,000,000 stars that make up our Galaxy (itself one of many)
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Naming the stars
There are only a few things money can't buy and your name on a star is one of them. So how are they named?
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William Hodges and Captain Cook
The artist William Hodges accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific in 1772-74.
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The farthest object in the Solar System
What would you see at the furthermost edge of the Solar System as you finally left the Sun behind?
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Planet Jupiter | Gas giant and King of planets
The planet Jupiter's more massive than all the other planets in the Solar System put together. It's a stormy mass of raging gas and metallic hydrogen.
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Christopher Middleton North-West Passage expedition 1741–42
In 1741, Anglo-Irish MP Arthur Dobbs commissioned Christopher Middleton, a captain in the Hudson's Bay Company, to search for the North-West Passage.