The Milky Way has captivated the mind of multitudes ever since the beginning of time. Particularly striking are its apparent dusty gaping voids. With the advent of near-infrared technology, astronomers have discovered an awesome new view of its structure, and of the structure of other galaxies around us. Galaxies are encased within Shrouds of the Night: shrouds or veils of cosmic dust, which have given us a totally incomplete picture of what our majestic Universe actually looks like. In this book, we feature some of the remarkable early photographic work of masters such as Isaac Roberts and Edward Barnard, before presenting to the reader the unmasked (dust penetrated) view of our cosmos, using some of the worlds largest ground and space-based telescopes.

David Block is Director of the Anglo American Cosmic Dust Laboratory and Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He has been a visiting astronomer at the European Southern Observatory, the Institute of Astronomy (Hawaii) and the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University. His research has twice been featured on the cover of the journal "Nature" and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society of London at age 19.

Ken Freeman FRS is Duffield Professor of Astronomy at the Australian National University. He was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Oort Professor at Leiden University, Blaauw Professorat the University of Groningen and Tinsley Professor at the University of Texas. He is one of the first astronomers to show that spiral galaxies are immersed in a vast halo of dark matter, and is one of Australias most highly cited scientists.

The Grand Stage Before Us: The Sidereal Messenger.- Cosmic Masks: Shrouds of the Night.- Detectives in Chile.- Chemical Factories Smaller than a Snowflake.- From Seeds to Stars: The Art and Science of Classification.- The Dawning of the Photographic Era.- John Reynolds: Morphologist Extraordinaire.- The Dust Penetrated Universe: Hidden Symmetries.- The Grand Bow.- Penetrating the Mask of Time.- Eyes to the Future: Where Eagles Soar.- Planets Orbiting other Stars.- The Insignificance of Man?.- The Mind of God.- Scholium.