Swerdlow N. The Renaissance of Astronomy 2026

Textbook in PDF format

The Renaissance of Astronomy provides a comprehensive, technically grounded account of the works of Regiomontanus, Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler and Galileo. There is nothing comparable to it in scope and detail. It is the fruit of a lifetime of study devoted to the subject.
It is the first book to provide systematic, rigorous introductions to the work of the five great astronomers who replaced the geocentric model of the planetary system with a heliocentric one. It also offers novel analyses on many points of detail---for example, the astrological interests and practices of Regiomontanus, Kepler, and Galileo. Technical expositions are accompanied by a very large number of diagrams of high quality, made by the author, Noel Swerdlow. The section on Tycho Brahe was left incomplete at Swerdlow's death