The Astrobook

This repository holds official source files for building The Astrobook, an open-source book on astronomy, focused on both celestial and orbital mechanics and who's main purpose is to be completely reproducible, free and accessible anywhere.

Why this book?

Academical and technical books are usually expensive. Old book versions might contain outdated content or some kind of errata, forcing reader to have always the latest edition. By having online materials like this one, content is always up to date and thus, you are not required to buy more editions.

Another reason behind writing this book is learning while teaching. Writing a simple section or chapter might be the final result of a deep search and study on a particular topic, increasing not only authors knowledge but also community one.

Finally, a modern approach is also applied: different computer algorithms are presented to readers as other daily used tools, always keeping in mind open-source features.

About its content

All the content of this book is based on reputable information sources such us science articles, technical books and manuals.Thus, every chapter contains at the end a list of references so reader can easily find original content. In addition to this, all figures of this book can be easily reproduce since they are based on a vector drawing software.

First chapters of the book are just a brief introduction to astronomy basics. As you advance in your reading task, orbital mechanics topics are introduced from the two-body problem till more complex topics such us interplanetary flight.

How can you contribute

If you are interested in contributing to this project, you can refer to official contributing guide. Within this page, different contribution topics are presented, such as writing book content, drawing technical figures or package maintenance.

Contact

If you are interested to contact official developers, please send an email to [email protected] with the subject Astrobook followed by any other keywords which advice about your reason to communicate with us.