Welcome to The Astrobook¶
The Astrobook is an open-source book on astronomy, focused on celestial and orbital mechanics. Because its digital nature, it is possible to serve it online, making it accessible to readers all over the world.
All materials presented within this page and those others hosted in official source code repository are subjected to a custom project license. Although it enables you to freely use all project contents, limitations are imposed regarding their original author and final use. Please, take your time to read carefully all terms and check if they match with your purposes.
Finally, if you find any kind of error or would like to improve the book by adding more content or information, please refer to the contributing guide. This file will guide you in the process through which you can help to the project either adding new features or solving different issues.
Purpose of this book¶
The main objective of The Astrobook is to be an open-source reference book for both celestial and orbital mechanics. All of its content is completely fully reproducible, so anyone can get an exact copy of the latest available version.
It tries to cover all possible topics within previously cited study fields. Reputable source materials and corresponding references citations are used every time a new topic is developed. By providing interactive images together with practical examples all of them supported by deep theoretical explanations, reader is expected to have a learning process more enjoyable than the one provided just by plain texts books.
Finally, this book is also a tribute to all those people and pioneers in the field and their contributions to the astronomy science and all its branches.
Why an online book?¶
Technical and academical books are usually expensive from the point of view of students. At some point, they might become outdated, forcing readers to buy new editions or just avoiding to use old versions. Some of these volumes can have hundreds of pages, which increase their weight, making it annoying to carry the books anywhere you go. By having an online book you can get rid of all the problems presented in the lines before: it is easy to update and cheap to maintain, easy to carry and accessible anywhere where an Ethernet connection exists.
Furthermore, because of being an open-source project, anyone can extend its content by adding new features, explanations or even fixing errors and bugs. The bigger the community, the greater the project will be!
About its structure¶
Two main parts can be differentiated in this book: astronomy basics and orbital mechanics. Almost all text work about orbital mechanics is just focused on this branch of astronomy and does not cover anything related to its mother science. Some astronomy concepts are required if a deep study on particular orbital mechanics topic is needed. For this reason, an introduction to astronomy science and some important topics is provided as the first part of the book.
On the other hand, the orbital mechanics part provides reader with complete explanations on the field. Those explanations ship together with computer methods for solving complex presented problems, making the study of the subject more practical and modern. This part might be understood as the core of the book.
Before reading¶
This project is still under development and thus, some of its structure and contents might be modified or updated till a stable version is released. When using materials provided in this text or any other, check those against other reputable information sources, as non-intentional errors might have been introduced. Enjoy your reading and report any kind of issue in the official issues collection. Enjoy your reading!