Every academic year, I give one lecture course – on the physics of the solar system – in which I avoid the temptation of simply recycling material from the previous year. Quite simply, so much is happening that it would be impossible to leave the content unchanged. Since last year’s course ended in November, for example, the Huygens probe has transformed our picture of Titan from a fuzzy orange ball into a world replete with methane-carved river valleys, lake beds and shorelines. Deep Impact has given us the first detailed tour of comet Tempel I’s landscape of craters and scarps, and added a new crater of its own. And in the cold underworld beyond Neptune, lonely little Pluto has been displaced as king of the Kuiper-belt objects by a larger, more distant, and as-yet-nameless body simply designated 2003 UB313.

We have all grown accustomed to the “nineness” of the planets in the 75 years since Clyde Tombaugh’s painstaking search revealed the longsought ninth planet. Indeed, the reactions of astronomers and public alike to Pluto’s embattled planetary status have revealed a surprising emotional attachment to this remote little ice-ball. Pluto, like the longer-established planets in our system, is the subject of heroic tales – both mythological and modern. Perhaps we fear that the loss of Pluto’s planethood, like the loss of an ageing relative, will dull the memory of a thread of family history. If so, the timing of Dava Sobel’s new book is fortuitous.

The Planets provides a snapshot of the mythology, the tales of discovery, and the landscapes and physical histories of all the ancient and modern members of the Sun’s family. Like Sobel’s earlier accounts of John Harrison’s chronometers and the life of Galileo, it combines masterful storytelling with clear, engaging explanations of the essential scientific details. Rather than being a single narrative, the book’s chapters form a sequence of essays, one per planet.

In exploring the mythological significance of the planets, Sobel weaves poetry and mysticism seamlessly into the back-plot of each world’s tale. She uses the language of the book of Genesis to illuminate the modern-day creation story from the Big Bang to the violent events in the solar nebula that gave birth first to the planets, then to life on Earth. The history of Mars is recounted from the point of view of one of the red planet’s best-known emissaries to Earth – the meteorite ALH 84001.

Every planet has its unique mythological personality, born of its appearance and the rhythm of its motion across the skies. In the pre-telescopic era, the meticulous record-keeping of Ptolemy, Tycho and many other astronomers revealed inconsistencies in the movements of the planets. Sobel highlights the bits that did not quite fit and the upheavals in human thought that were required to solve the puzzles they presented. She describes, for example, how Copernicus dared to displace the Earth from the centre of the system, and how Kepler and Newton provided the laws needed to predict the planets’ wanderings in the context of the Copernican system.

Sobel also explains how John Adams and Urbain Leverrier used Newton’s laws to predict Neptune’s location from irregularities in the orbital motion of Uranus. This particular tale – replete with heroes and villains – is told in the form of a fictionalized letter from the ageing Caroline Herschel to a young American astronomer Maria Mitchell who had discovered a comet in 1847. Only stubborn Mercury held out, its mischievous perihelion motion spawning searches for a non-existent Vulcan until an elated Einstein found the explanation in general relativity.

The telescopic era brought new wonders, with tantalizing glimpses of the faces of the planets. Today, even from a suburban back garden, anyone with a small telescope can see the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and the polar caps of Mars that have entranced astronomers for centuries. Galileo, watching the four “Medicean moons” perform their daily shuffle about giant Jupiter, saw their implications for the unpopular Copernican system. Eugène Antoniadi, Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell – patiently awaiting those elusive moments of atmospheric clarity – drew the first, sometimes fanciful, maps of Mercury and Mars. Seasonal changes in the colouring of the Martian deserts suggested tracts of vegetation. For a while, Schiaparelli and Lowell’s fleetingly glimpsed linear features became the canals of Lowell’s doomed Martian civilization. The brilliant cloud tops of Venus, however, yielded no secrets.

In only half a human lifetime – since Sobel made her first model of the solar system for a school project – the planets have one by one been transformed from distant fuzzy blobs into fully fledged alien worlds, with their own landscapes and weather systems that seem at once familiar and bizarre. But new knowledge sometimes carries a price. There was, for Sobel, the bitter childhood disappointment of seeing Mars transformed from a chilly but life-bearing world into a lifeless, black-and-white desert pocked with ancient craters, and Venus from a possible lush tropical paradise into a stifling inferno.

Men walked on the Moon, and brought home images of the Earth that revealed a fragile, lonely jewel the resources of which are finite and should not be taken for granted. But there have been moments of elation and wonder too. We have all seen pictures of the Voyager craft sweeping past the gas giants, and of volcanic Io and ice-bound Europa as coloured billiard balls against the swirling backdrop of Jupiter. We have seen Kepler’s vision of the music of the spheres echoing in the intricate braiding of Saturn’s rings, and unforeseen complexity in the liquid-nitrogen geysers on Triton, their dark plumes pointing downwind in a place once thought too cold to sustain an atmosphere.

As Sobel acknowledges in her final chapter, there is no satisfactory way to end the story of a field where the pace of discovery remains so fast. But the old stories endure as well as the new ones, and to be able to see these wonders for yourself, you need only look up occasionally.