Can you suggest a good primer on astrophysics for the lay person?

I'm looking for a set of references and/or websites that could give me a basic course in "astrophysics for dummies". I find the topic fascinating, and am currently working on a sci fi novel and would like to do some serious research first.





I've noticed that the Dummies series of books publishes a book called "Astronomy for Dummies" but I'd like to make sure that this really isn't just "Stargazing for Dummies" or some really primitive treatise on the subject.|||Universe (7th ed.) by Roger A. Freedman and William J. Kaufmann III.


W.H. Freeman, New York, 2005.





It covers the entire topic (incl. celestial mechanics, stellar evolution, planet morphology, solar system evolution, cosmology), at visual, radio, X-ray and gamma ray astronomy levels.





it assumes that you have some level of science (advanced high school) in physics and chemistry -- you should at the very minimum understand what is an atom, a nucleus, an ion.





Some mathematics, but not a whole lot; and not very complicated.





There are some exercises at the end of each chapter and it is better to do a few, because the knowledge you gain will be useful in further chapters.





It is designed as a class text, able to be used as self-teaching guide (if you do the exercises). There is a web site for guidance with problems (but I've never used it).|||The Website below has a *lot* of information. It is written for someone with at least some science background.|||Yeah, the Dummies book you mention is pretty much a constellation guide with extremely limited physics information. Go with the layman's standard A Brief History of Time by Hawking and the updated versions too. A good set I really liked were Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe and Fabric of the Cosmos. The late Carl Sagan's Cosmos book is also good reading. Yes, it is outdated, but what information it does contain is still good. There is an illustrated version of it, too.


All of these combined will give you a good foundation of what you are looking for.|||My favorite general astronomy text is The Cosmic Perspective by Jeff Bennett. Having exposure to good dozen intro text books in the 90's mostly, this was the one that did the best job of explaining things to non-technical college students.





Writing SciFi you are likely to be more intersted in technological topics than astronomical phenomomena unless you have specific story in mind in which some phenomenon plays a major role. In that case, read up the paragraph or two you find in the general text and follow up with the references at the end of that chapter. Then, ask an astronomer for laypersons translation of the intimate details of the phenomenon in question and have them proof your draft for scientific accuracy later.|||Pal there are lots of stuffs you could browse - use yahoo search or google search.





Try entering something like "basic cosmology" as keyword...