Arthur Berry’s A Short History of Astronomy (1898) remains one of the best single-volume histories of the science ever written: Babylon and Greece, Ptolemy to Copernicus, Kepler, Newton and the triumphs of celestial mechanics, told with mathematical honesty yet fully readable prose.
Historians of astronomy still recommend Berry as the reliable first mile. Download the free EPUB for the whole story of the oldest science, expertly compressed.