Fundamental Astronomy

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 hi...