Challenges of Astronomy in a unique collection of thirty astronomy experiments ranging from ancient astronomy to cosmology. Each of the experiments contains one or more challenges for the reader. The progression is from the Earth outward through the solar system to the stellar and galactic realm. Topics include the shape of the sky, Stonehenge as a stoneage abacus, determination of the size of the Earth, the distance of the Moon and planets, Kepler's laws, planetary mass and density, the temperatures and atmospheres of planets, the speed of light, the distances of stars, the nature of the quiet and active Sun, photometry and spectroscopy, stars clusters and variable stars, fundamental properties of stars, and Olber's paradox. Challenges of Astronomy is a translation and extensive revision of a German-language resource book for secondary school teachers of science. Physical science teachers will find this edition too a rich resource of experiments to their own milieus, but it is suitable for many other English-language readers too, from northern and southern hemisphere locations. The beginning experiments are suitable for bright high school and non-science major university students while the later experiments which offer increasingly difficult challenges are more suitable for sciences majors. Amateurs with a variety of skills will find this hands-on book entertaining, informative, and useful.

Challenges of Astronomy in a unique collection of thirty astronomy experiments ranging from ancient astronomy to cosmology. Each of the experiments contains one or more challenges for the reader. The progression is from the Earth outward through the solar system to the stellar and galactic realm. Topics include the shape of the sky, Stonehenge as a stoneage abacus, determination of the size of the Earth, the distance of the Moon and planets, Kepler's laws, planetary mass and density, the temperatures and atmospheres of planets, the speed of light, the distances of stars, the nature of the quiet and active Sun, photometry and spectroscopy, stars clusters and variable stars, fundamental properties of stars, and Olber's paradox.
Challenges of Astronomy is a translation and extensive revision of a German-language resource book for secondary school teachers of science. Physical science teachers will find this edition too a rich resource of experiments to their own milieus, but it is suitable for many other English-language readers too, from northern and southern hemisphere locations. The beginning experiments are suitable for bright high school and non-science major university students while the later experiments which offer increasingly difficult challenges are more suitable for sciences majors. Amateurs with a variety of skills will find this hands-on book entertaining, informative, and useful.

Extinction and standardization corrections to infrared measurements are of the utmost importance in astronomy. Various views on these concepts and problems of implementation in infrared photometry are discussed thoroughly and recommendations are presented. Among these are: the adoption of narrower broad-band "Johnson" filters that are better centered in the atmospheric water windows than is currently the case; the measurements of atmospheric water vapor content concurrent with the astronomical measurements; the use of appropriate atmospheric models to treat the extinction adequately; and the publication of complete details of the systemic passbands and their transformability to other systems. To conclude the volume, R. Bell summarizes and comments on the contributions to the symposium, and the editor adds a concluding postscript on post-meeting developments and perspectives.

In the two decades since the development of the first eclipsing-binary modeling code, new analytic techniques and the availability of powerful, sometimes dedicated computing facilities have made possible vastly improved determinations of fundamental and even transient stellar parameters. The scale of these developments, of course, raises questions about modeling tools, techniques, and philosophies, such as: Who will maintain and upgrade the codes? Will the codes be open to improvement by outsiders, and if so, how? And, indeed, what should be the goals of a modeling program? Such questions had not been aired for a long time and, for this reason alone, deserved to be discussed in as general a forum as the community provides. This volume contains material presented by Commission 42 (Close Binary Stars) during the International Astronomical Union's XXI General Assembly in Argentina, July 1991, and during IAU Colloquium 151, Cordoba, Argentina, August 1991. The techniques discussed include simulations of stellar bright and dark spots, streams, partial and complete stellar disks, prominences, and other features characterizing active stars; modeling of polarization parameters; models that use radial velocities as well as line profile simulations to model velocity field variation across stellar disks; the weighted effects of brightness asymmetries; and models for translucent eclipsing agents such as stellar winds.