Astrophysics and Stellar Astronomy (Space Science Text Series)

By Thomas L. Swihart

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471839906
• ISBN13: 9780471839903
• Release Date: January 1969
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
• Length: 309 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Excellent textbook for Astronomy students

I was lucky enough to have Dr Swihart as one of my professors when I was at the University of Arizona in the mid-1980s. The late Dr Swihart was an excellent instructor, and you can't be an excellent instructor if you don't know your material inside-and-out. Even though this book was published at about the same time I was born, it is remarkably up-to-date (science doesn't change, but technology and even theories will over time). This book would have been an ideal textbook in my Astronomy 271 (first-semester Astronomy for majors; we're not talking about the 100-level "let's look at the stars and Moon" classes) class, except a) Dr Swihart didn't inflate his own income by requiring students to purchase his own textbook (oh, would that we still had professors like that nowadays), and b) since he was giving the lectures himself, it was just like having the textbook there in person anyway! After a (very) brief introduction to spherical astronomy and some basic concepts, the book goes into blackbody radiation, gas laws, spectra, and radiation (with interludes to topics such as stellar motion and binaries). I remember at one point joking with Dr Swihart that I was going to take his lecture notes and turn them into a book, since his lectures were of such a high quality, that it was very easy to learn the material. He laughed and told me to go ahead. Well, I never did - and I didn't need to. Because his book - THIS book - already existed. There is a lot of mathematics in this book, but there are also "real English" descriptions, which make it almost as if Dr Swihart was still here and lecturing to his students. I highly recommend this book for anyone with moderate physics and mathematics background, and for use in early Astronomy-major classes.