This book by a prominent Soviet astronomer and imaginative interpreter of the history and latest knowledge of astronomy, an age-old science that has come through two shattering decades of exciting discovery and research, can be dubbed a popular encyclopaedia of astronomy. It is a vivid and fascinating account of almost all the celestial bodies with which astronomy is concerned: planets, comets, meteors, the Sun and stars, gaseous and dust nebulae, quasars, black hole., etc. The tome is lavishly illustrated throughout with a mixture of photographs and specially commissioned artwork in full colour. The book will appeal to the general reader with no astronomical and mathematical background, fascinated by the wonders of the Space Age.
The book has two major sections, the first deals with Solid matter, that is the planets (minor and major), comets and meteors. The second part deals with the gaseous state which includes stars, nebulae, galaxies, interstellar matter. Mathematics is avoided as much as possible with the main emphasis on explaining the physical meaning of the concepts and their implications to the reader. The book covers an impressively wide range of topics in astronomy starting from the basics to topics of cutting-edge research.
The book was translated from the Russian by Alexander Repyev and was published by Mir 1985.
Note: The book is large in size (~ 190 MB). It took some time to scan it, as I had to scan individual pages because of their large size almost A4 in size. Unfortunately, before the optimisation of the images could be completed, I lost all the raw images to a disk crash. Hence I have uploaded the pdf that could be salvaged. You might notice some inconsistencies in the pages here and there. There are some amazing full-page illustrations, one of my favourites is one explaining the meteor path for different observers.
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