Keplerian Ellipses: The physics of the gravitational two-body problem

The development of man's understanding of planetary motions is the crown jewel of Newtonian mechanics. This book offers a concise but self-contained handbook-length treatment of this historically important topic for students at about the third-year-level of an undergraduate physics curriculum. After opening with a review of Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion, it proceeds to analyze the general dynamics of “central force” orbits in spherical coordinates, how elliptical orbits satisfy Ne...