Quote:
Originally Posted by Weltevreden SA
For some reason Dina Pralnik's book doesn't measure up in this league.
|
I am glad you agree with my recommendations of De Boer & Seggewiss, and Salaris and Cassisi. Though we aren't exactly typical amateurs......."super-advanced amateur astronomers" is arguably a better descriptor than "advanced amateurs", as we quite commonly sweat through papers in the AJ, ApJ, etc.
(The average amateur astronomer will find these two books much too hard! )
Prialnik is essentially a well-written book about the astrophysics of stellar interiors, so it is well suited to its purpose, but it has much less emphasis on the observables of how stars evolve, in the practical sense of the time-evolution of the observable (or easily derivable) stellar quantities with time (e.g. luminosity , colour, mass, spectrum, radius, etc.) . Prialnik emphasizes the physics of stellar structure, supposedly reduced to its 'basics'......but even reduced to its basics, this stuff is hard!....unless of course the reader is a physicist or has a degree in applied mathematics. Prialnik requires, as an absolute minimum prerequisite, that the reader has had a good dose of undergraduate physics and mathematics.
Essentially, Prialnik is an astrophysics textbook, and if you have ever tried to sweat through any kind of astrophysics text, you will know that astrophysics textbooks are mainly suitable for people with a very strong maths and physics orientation.
Prialnik is commonly regarded as one of the most accessible of the "physics and maths intensive" texts on stars.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Weltevreden SA
Thanks for starting this post, Robert. I hope you follow up with other recommendations in the many specialties that interest us.
|
As you know, I personally own most of the textbooks on galaxies, and stellar evolution, and the interstellar medium, as long as the readership-level of the book is not above that of some of the easier upper-undergraduate and graduate texts.
However, I dip into astronomy and galaxies much less frequently than I used to, as I have been working my way through my vast and comprehensive collection of books on the Australian landscape, geology, biology, and ecology. So madbadgalaxyman is essentially in recess, a lot of the time.
Two of the "free" books that I gave links to in my email to your gmail address are absolutely the most Dana-relevant texts that I have seen for a long time:
"Lessons from the Local Group", eds Freeman & Elmegreen & Block, published by Springer
Cost is $349 (!!!!) US Dollars, so hard to feel sympathy for the publisher if people find ways to get it for much much less.
This book is a very worthy successor to Sidney van den Bergh's year 2000 book that summarized all that was known about the LG at that time. It would seem that 20 times as much is known about the LG as was known in year 2000!
"Accretion Processes in Star Formation" by Lee Hartmann.
Wonderfully accessible Cambridge Press book on star formation, at the upper-undergraduate level, and not too hard for the likes of you and me. But how amazing that 7 years after publication, the book is now already substantially out-of-date!
___________________
Oh, and on the topic of "super-advanced amateurs", one of our spectroscopists has just been a co-author of a peer-reviewed scientific paper. He goes by the name of Bernard (IIS userid = Glenpiper)
___________________