Description: Radio astronomy is an active and rapidly expanding field due to advances in computing techniques, with several important new instruments on the horizon. This text provides a thorough introduction to radio astronomy and its contribution to our understanding of the universe, bridging the gap between basic introductions and research-level treatments. It begins by covering the fundamentals physics of radio techniques, before moving on to single-dish telescopes and aperture synthesis arrays. Fully updated and extensively rewritten, the fourth edition places greater emphasis on techniques, with detailed discussion of interferometry in particular, and comprehensive coverage of digital techniques in the appendices. The science sections are fully revised, with new author Peter N. Wilkinson bringing added expertise to the sections on pulsars, quasars and active galaxies. Spanning the entirety of radio astronomy, this is an engaging introduction for students and researchers approaching radio astronomy for the first time.
Brief description: Bernard F. Burke was William A. M. Burden Professor of Astrophysics, formerly of the Radio Astronomy Group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Research Laboratory of Electronics, and principal investigator at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. He was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1970, and served as the American Astronomical Society (AAS) President from 1986 to 1988. He and Kenneth Franklin discovered Jupiter as a source of radio waves while working at the Carnegie Institution for Science; and he was part of the 6-member team credited with the 1988 discovery of the first Einstein ring.
Review Quotes: '... the book succeeds in its overall aims, and the fourth edition, with nearly a hundred pages of extra material and substantial additional on-line resources, is a useful upgrade from the third.' Martin Hardcastle, The Observatory