A group of college friends decide to put a hollow sphere of brick into orbit as a navigational aid, and accidentally launch it with people inside. Hale published it in 1869 - the first description in fiction of an artificial satellite, worked out with figures, thirty years before anyone took the idea seriously. Fifty-nine plates of stars, skies and star-gazing by painters including Odilon Redon and Henri-Edmond Cross, from 1815 to 1928, give the book's celestial machinery its visual counterpart.