Fundamental Astronomy

Description

The main purpose of this book is to serve as a university textbook for a first course in astronomy. However, we believe that the audience will also include many serious ama­ teurs, who often find the popular texts too trivial. The lack of a good handbook for am­ ateurs has become a problem lately, as more and more people are buying personal com­ puters and need exact, but comprehensible, mathematical formalism for their programs. The reader of this book is assumed to have only a standard high-school knowledge of mathematics and physics (as they are taught in Finland); everything more advanced is usually derived step by step from simple basic principles. The mathematical background needed includes plane trigonometry, basic differential and integral calculus, and (only in the chapter dealing with celestial mechanics) some vector calculus. Some mathematical concepts the reader may not be familiar with are briefly explained in the appendices or can be understood by studying the numerous exercises and examples. However, most of the book can be read with very little knowledge of mathematics, and even if the reader skips the mathematically more involved sections, (s)he should get a good overview of the field of astronomy. This book has evolved in the course of many years and through the work of several authors and editors. The first version consisted of lecture notes by one of the editors (Oja). Front Matter....Pages I-XI Introduction....Pages 1-7 Spherical Astronomy....Pages 9-46 Observations and Instruments....Pages 47-85 Photometric Concepts and Magnitudes....Pages 87-102 Radiation Mechanisms....Pages 103-118 Temperatures....Pages 119-122 Celestial Mechanics....Pages 123-146 The Solar System....Pages 147-214 Stellar Spectra....Pages 215-230 Binary Stars and Stellar Masses....Pages 231-239 Stellar Structure....Pages 241-258 Stellar Evolution....Pages 259-276 The Sun....Pages 277-289 Variable Stars....Pages 291-303 Compact Stars....Pages 305-315 The Interstellar Medium....Pages 317-348 Star Clusters and Associations....Pages 349-355 The Milky Way....Pages 357-378 Galaxies....Pages 379-403 Cosmology....Pages 405-427 Back Matter....Pages 429-478