Observational Astrophysics

✍ Scribed by Pierre Léna, François Lebrun, François Mignard (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 518
• Series: Astronomy and Astrophysics Library
• Edition: 2
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Written specifically for physicists and graduate students in astronomy, this textbook focuses on astronomical observation and on the basic physical principles that astronomers use to conceive, build and exploit their instruments at their ultimate limits in sensitivity or resolution. This second edition has been entirely restructured and almost doubled in size, in order to improve its clarity and to account for the great progress achieved in the last 15 years. It deals with ground-based and space-based astronomy and their respective fields. It presents the new generation of giant ground-based telescopes, with the new methods of optical interferometry and adaptive optics, and also the ambitious concepts behind planned space missions for the next decades. Avoiding particulars, it covers the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum, and touches upon the "new astronomies" becoming possible with gravitational waves and neutrinos.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages I-XV
Astrophysical Information....Pages 1-30
The Earth’s Atmosphere and Space....Pages 31-77
Radiation and Photometry....Pages 79-106
Telescopes and Images....Pages 107-195
Spectral Analysis....Pages 197-254
The Signal in Astronomy....Pages 255-288
Detectors....Pages 289-383
Space-Time Reference Frames....Pages 385-418
Back Matter....Pages 419-512

✦ Subjects

Astronomy, Astrophysics and Cosmology; Geophysics/Geodesy