Compiled by a team of experts, this textbook has been designed for elementary university courses in astronomy and astrophysics. It starts with a detailed discus

Discusses the stories which people from the ancient world told to explain their understanding of what they could see in the sky.

How do astronomers know what they know about the stars and planets? That is the question behind today's rapid pace of cosmic discovery, for every new finding re

Most avid sky gazers wait until nightfall to catch a glimpse of the stars that are scattered across the heavens. The fact of the matter is that one needs only t

Magnetic energy release plays an important role in a wide variety of cosmic objects such as the Sun, stellar coronae, stellar and galactic accretion disks and p