Physics Blog

Contents at a Glance

Part 1: Finding Our Place in Space 1

1 Naked Sky, Naked Eye: Finding Your Way in the Dark 3
Finding your way around the night sky. No telescope
necessary.
2 Ancient Evenings: The First Watchers 17
What the ancient astronomers saw, thought, and said.
3 The Unexplained Motions of the Heavens 31
Puzzles of planetary motion: early thoughts on the subject.
4 Astronomy Reborn: 1543–1687 47
Everything (well, not really) you need to know about
Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton.

Part 2: Now You See It (Now You Don’t) 63

5 The Art of Collecting Light (with a Telescope) 65
Telescopes: what they see and how they work.
6 You and Your Telescope 81
A guide to choosing and using binoculars and telescopes.
7 Over the Rainbow 101
Electromagnetic radiation: what it is, how it travels, and
what it does.
8 Seeing in the Dark 117
Alternatives to visible-light astronomy: radio, infrared,
ultraviolet, and high energy.
9 Space Race: From Sputnik to the International
Space Station 131
A brief history of space exploration.


Part 3: A Walk Around the Block 147

10 The Moon: Our Closest Neighbor 149
All about Earth’s moon.
11 Solar System Home Movie 161
How our solar system was born and developed.
12 Solar System Family Snapshot 173
A tour through our solar system.
13 So Close and Yet So Far: The Inner Planets 189
The lowdown on Mercury, Venus, and Mars.
14 Great Balls of Gas! The Outer Planets 205
All about Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter, and Saturn.
15 The Far End of the Block 221
The moons and rings of the jovian planets, and the
story of Pluto.

Part 4: To the Stars 235
16 Our Star 237

We explore the sun.
17 Of Giants and Dwarfs: Stepping Out into the Stars 251
Observing, measuring, and classifying stars.
18 Stellar Careers 267
How stars evolve—and how they end their lives.
19 Black Holes: One-Way Tickets to Eternity 279
Stellar endgames: neutron stars, black holes, and the
strange effects they produce.
20 Stellar Nurseries 289
How stars are created.

Part 5: Way Out of This World 301

21 The Milky Way: Much More Than a Candy Bar 303
A tour of our home Galaxy.
22 A Galaxy of Galaxies 317
Observing, measuring, and classifying galaxies.
23 Moving Out of Town 331
Active versus normal galaxies: Seyfert and radio galaxies,
plus quasars
.
Part 6: The Big Questions 341

24 Table for One? 343
The odds on life beyond Earth and on other civilizations
in the Milky Way.
25 What About the Big Bang? 359
How it all began (we think).
26 (How) Will It End? 369
Is the universe infinite or finite? Eternal or mortal? Will it
end—and if so, how?

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