An Introduction to the Sun and Stars

Are you an amateur astronomer with a scientific or technical background or bent? Would you like to study a college-level introductory astronomy text just for the fun of it? Do you wish for an approach that's not just qualitative, like the majority of American texts, which employ minimal mathematics and mostly confine their more quantitative treatments of subjects as elaborations in a box or sidebar? Do you want a book that fearlessly dives into quantitative analysis of the physics of astronomy – astrophysics – within the main text? Are you a college instructor looking for such a text?If so, and your ambitions extend into differential and integral calculus, then look for a book with "astrophysics" in its title. If you're looking for the middle road, I'd say this is the book for you. To me, it looks like astrophysics without calculus. It's lushly graphical, like all contemporary introductory texts for non-physics majors, and comprehensibly written with the neophyte in mind. But it has considerable depth and a wealth of detail, and looks to me to be a suitable text for a first course in astronomy/astrophysics pitched at those who will go on to take a major or a minor in the subject. Or for an amateur astronomer who'd take such a course if they were back at school.Parenthetically, the spiral binding is a real plus. It’s hard as the devil to get a conventionally bound textbook to lie flat on the table in front of you, or to hold in your lap, but this style is manageable in any situation.

I love astronomy, and this textbook is a great addition to my collection of books about the cosmos. Not too technical, but definitely for someone past elementary school.

I love this book! As advertised on the back cover, this textbook deals with the basic properties of stars. It was exciting for me to work my way thru the book's discussion of topics such as determining star brightness, mass size, distance, distributions in space, how stars change, life-cycles, stellar energy, and various types of stars.The book begins with a study of our sun, then extends to a study of stars in general.Chapter Titles include:CH 1- Seeing the SunCH 2- The Working SunCH 3- Measuring StarsCH 4- Comparing StarsCH 5- Star FormationCH 6- Main Sequence Life of StarsCH 7- Stars Beyond The Main SequenceCH 8- The Death of StarsCH 9- Star RemnantsOne thing I especially enjoyed were the numerous student exercises (over 100!) with complete answers and solutions available at the back of the book- something very important if doing a self-study.The book avoids complex mathematics and does not show detailed derivations but does assume an understanding of basic non-calculus mathematics an undergraduate college student majoring in physics would have.In summary, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Astronomy and Astrophysics. I also highly recommend a similar type companion book "AN INTRODUCTION TO GALAXIES AND COSMOLOGY" (Jones, Lambourne, Serjeant) which follows the same format.