I was delighted to be invited by my colleagues Alessandra Celletti and Ettore Perozzi to provide a foreword to their book, Celestial Mechanics: The Waltz of the Planets. Having known them for many years and long admired their work in the subject so many of us love and are fascinated by, 1 read with great attention and pleasure the text when it arrived. It is a formidable task they have set themselves, to provide a book that describes attempts by successive generations of astronomers from the dawn of history five millennia ago to observe, record and understand the phenomena of the heavens,...
I was delighted to be invited by my colleagues Alessandra Celletti and Ettore Perozzi to provide a foreword to their book, Celestial Mechanics: The Wa...
Of all the fixed stars in the night sky, Sirius is by far the brightest almost twice as bright as its nearest rival, the star Canopus, which lies too far south to be viewed from most of the Northern Hemisphere. Only the Sun, Moon and the planets Venus, Jupiter and, at times, Mars, appear brighter. Sirius, with its flashing brilliance, is a striking feature of the northern winter sky and has understandably drawn the attention of observers of the night sky for thousands of years.
Sirius has many names. Astronomers recognize over fifty designations for the star, but the most...
Of all the fixed stars in the night sky, Sirius is by far the brightest almost twice as bright as its nearest rival, the star Canopus, which lies t...
