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Provides a detailed look at the events and policies surrounding the Iranian space endeavor. For those who see the trend of progress and movement of the Iranian space endeavor from the outside, it can be difficult to understand what goes on behind the scenes. However, for one who observes these events firsthand, they take on a very different meaning. In this book, the author brings new and different profiles of Iran’s space endeavor to light. Iran claims to be the ninth leading country in the world capable of manufacturing satellites and launching them, plans to land an astronaut on the Moon within a decade, and says its own president plans to be the first Iranian astronaut to travel into space. The author explains in this book that not all of these claims are quite as they seem. In addition to technical explanations, the book also includes historical, legal, social and cultural aspects of Iran’s space program as well. It is the author’s goal to create a tangible feeling of Iran’s space endeavor for the readers.
Iran is a key player in some of the most crucial issues of our time. But because of its relative diplomatic isolation and the partisan nature of conflicting accounts voiced by different interest groups both inside and outside the country, there is a shortage of hard information about the scale and depth of social change in today's Iran. In this volume, and imposing roster of both internationally renowned Iranian scholars and rising young Iranian academics offer contributions--many based on recent fieldwork--on the nature and evolution of Iran's economy, significant aspects of Iran's changing society, and the dynamics of its domestic and international politics since the 1979 revolution, focusing particularly on the post-Khomeini period. The book will be of great interest not only to Iran specialists, but also to scholars of comparative politics, democratization, social change, politics in the Muslim world, and Middle Eastern studies.
The founding of the Dudley Observatory at Albany, N.Y., in 1852 was a milestone in humanity's age-old quest to understand the heavens. As the best equipped astronomical observatory in the U.S. led by the first American to hold a Ph.D. in astronomy, Benjamin Apthorp Gould Jr., the observatory helped pioneer world-class astronomy in America. It also proclaimed Albany's status as a major national center of culture, knowledge and affluence. This book explores the story of the Dudley Observatory as a 150 year long episode in civic astronomy. The story ranges from a bitter civic controversy to a venture into space, from the banks of the Hudson River to the highlands of Argentina. It is a unique glimpse at a path not taken, a way of doing science once promising, now vanished. As discoveries by the Dudley Observatory's astronomers, especially its second director Lewis Boss, made significant contributions to the modern vision of our Milky Way galaxy as a rotating spiral of more than a million stars, the advance of astronomy left that little observatory behind.
Quasars, and the menagerie of other galaxies with "unusual nuclei", now collectively known as Active Galactic Nuclei or AGN, have, in one form or another, sparked the interest of astronomers for over 60 years. The only known mechanism that can explain the staggering amounts of energy emitted by the innermost regions of these systems is gravitational energy release by matter falling towards a supermassive black hole --- a black hole whose mass is millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun. AGN emit radiation at all wavelengths. X-rays originating at a distance of a few times the event horizon of the black hole are the emissions closest to the black hole that we can detect; thus, X-rays...
Astrobiology, a new exciting interdisciplinary research field, seeks to unravel the origin and evolution of life wherever it might exist in the Universe. The current view of the origin of life on Earth is that it is strongly connected to the origin and evolution of our planet and, indeed, of the Universe as a whole. We are fortunate to be living in an era where centuries of speculation about the two ancient and fundamental problems: the origin of life and its prevalence in the Universe are being replaced by experimental science. The subject of Astrobiology can be approached from many different perspectives. This book is focused on abiogenic organic matter from the viewpoint of astronomy and ...
On the occasion of the retirement of Ulrich Schwarz, a symposium was held in Groningen in May of 1996, celebrating his contributions to the study of the int- stellar medium, including his work on the high-velocity clouds. The coming together of many specialists in the latter ?eld prompted the idea of compiling a book c- taining their contributions, and summarizing the status of our understanding of the high-velocity cloud phenomenon. This seemed especially worthwhile at the time, since many exciting developments were taking place. After the discovery of some H i clouds with high velocities, about 40 years ago, the subject had been dominated by 21-cm observations of H i emission. Starting in the mid-1980s much progress was being made because of the availability of new instruments, such as large ground-based optical telescopes and UV observatories in space. The connections between the work on high-velocity clouds and other studies of the properties of the (hot) interstellar medium also became clearer.
The mono graph contains 8 chapters, and their contents cover all principal aspects of the problem: 1. Introduction and brief his tory ofthe radiation problem and background information ofradiation hazard in the near-Earth and interplanetary space. 2. General description of radiation conditions and main sources of charged partic1es in the Earth's environment and interplanetary space, effects of space environment on spacecraft. 3. Basic information about physical conditions in space and main sources of charged particles in the Earth's environment and interplanetary space, in the context of "Space W eather" monitoring and prediction. 4. Trapped radiation belts of the Earth (ERB): theory of thei...
The Transactions XXVIIA Reports on Astronomy 2006-2009 provides a comprehensive and authoritative review of what has been achieved in astronomy during the years 2006 to 2009. These insightful and up-to-date reviews have been written by the presidents and chairpersons of the IAU scientific bodies: the Divisions, the Commissions, and the Working Groups. Topics covered in this wide-ranging volume include: fundamental astronomy; the Sun and heliosphere; planetary sciences; stars; variable stars; interstellar matter; the Galactic system; galaxies and the Universe; optical and infrared techniques; radio astronomy; space and high-energy astrophysics; and other IAU activities. The reviews have been written at a level suitable for colleagues in the same fields, but will also be useful for students and researchers wishing to gain an overview of astronomical fields beyond their own research area.
THE EDITORS: DAVID L. BLOCK AND KENNETH C. FREEMAN (SOC CO-CHAIRS), IVANIO PUERARI, ROBERT GROESS AND LIZ K. BLOCK 1. Harvard College Observatory, 1958 The past century has truly brought about an explosive period of growth and discovery for the physical sciences as a whole, and for astronomy in particular. Galaxy morphology has reached a renaissance . . The year: 1958. The date: October 1. The venue: Harvard College Observatory. The lecturer: Walter Baade. With amazing foresight, Baade penned these words: "Young stars, supergiants and so on, make a terrific splash - lots of light. The total mass of these can be very small compared to the total mass of the system". Dr Layzer then asked the ke...
This lecture describes the author's approach to the representation of color spaces and their use for color image processing. The lecture starts with a precise formulation of the space of physical stimuli (light). The model includes both continuous spectra and monochromatic spectra in the form of Dirac deltas. The spectral densities are considered to be functions of a continuous wavelength variable. This leads into the formulation of color space as a three-dimensional vector space, with all the associated structure. The approach is to start with the axioms of color matching for normal human viewers, often called Grassmann's laws, and developing the resulting vector space formulation. However,...