Introduction

This is a magic and dream book. The celestial observation began as an attempt to find out the design of the gods, to interpret their intentions and predict their consequences. Humans considered that everything that happened in the heavens would allow them to know future events, and the priests, so named or whatever otherwise, in the service of the lords of the Earth, they were in charge of deciphering them. Hence he imagined magical everything that happened in the sky light blue; the ad was considered a good harvest or a year of famine, success in a battle, the omen of the end of a reign, or any other situation that in the eyes of the powerful, or simply of the people, could seriously affect their well-being.

And this brought two consequences, a positive one like was the development of the scrutiny of the sky –astronomy– and of the techniques that made it possible, that without the patronage of the powerful would never have been possible; and another negative, the consolidation of popular belief that through the study of the stars – astrology – you could know our future more or less near. The origins of the latter date back to the Babylon of four millennia ago, but, as we know, stand firm today in consciousness popular through horoscopes. These actually are the representations of the planetary positions of the stars of our solar system (the planets, the Moon and Sun) on its annual journey over the plane through the that the Earth moves with respect to our star – the called ecliptic -, through the twelve equal parts into which the celestial vault is divided. These regions include constellations whose names originate those of the well-known signs of the Zodiac (Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces). The date, time and place of birth of a person or a certain event, allows to frame it in a region zodiacal, and from that, through a totally subjective interpretation, astrologers make their particular predictions. In ancient times, astrology and astronomy were closely linked. The second could not have develop without the superstitious drive of the former. But little by little, as the obscurantist darkness in the history of mankind, both were separated until the knowledge of the Renaissance placed astronomy as the science that we know today, and displaced astrology to the fields of esotericism and trickery that correspond.

But we also say that this is a book of dreams Man’s dream has always been to know his origin and destiny of him. Who we are, where we come from, where we are going, not only are three big questions, are the quintessential questions. And astronomy gives fulfilled response to each of them. Throughout this book we will delve into the paths of knowledge that will allow us to answer them, and with it we will discover ourselves, we will discover ourselves flying with our imaginations to those worlds that we imagined as children, we will discover ourselves astonishing ourselves with the wonders that the universe contains, we will discover ourselves surprising ourselves with the future that awaits us in the coming centuries, we will discover ourselves, in short, enjoying ourselves with the greatest of the spectacles that nature puts on within our reach, the one who makes us live our most fantastic, prodigious and unimaginable illusions, because astronomy is made of the material from which make up dreams.