Lecture notes "Radiative Transfer in Stellar Atmospheres"

Here is the current version of my course on radiative transfer in stellar atmospheres (6 Mbyte). The main topic treated in this 30-hour course is the classical theory of radiative transfer for explaining stellar spectra. It needs relatively much attention to be mastered. Radiative transfer in gaseous media that are neither optically thin nor fully opaque is a key part of astrophysics but not a transparent subject. My lecture notes represent a middle road between Mihalas' Stellar Atmospheres (graduate level and up) and the books by Novotny and Boehm-Vitense (undergraduate level). They are at about the level of Gray's The observation and analysis of stellar photospheres but emphasize NLTE radiative transfer rather than observational techniques and data interpretation.

The file contains active links so that with Acrobat Reader you can click on equation, figure and page references in the text to jump through the text. You can save and print the notes with Acrobat Reader. The printing may take hours because the notes unpack to about 160 Mbyte PostScript, due to many scanned graphs. If you share your printer with others it may be better to print the notes overnight, or in chunks using the "from-to" button in the print menu.

Here are also accompanying equation viewgraphs which are automatically cut out of the course by LaTeX and therefore display all equations identically to the ones in the lecture notes, with the same equation numbers. You have to skip the first pages.

I assert the moral right to be identified as the author of these notes. I explicitly permit multiplication and distribution for non-commercial educational purposes. I appreciate weblinks, citations, and acknowledgements. I do not appreciate sloppy stealing.

I intend to publish these lecture notes sometime. I also intend to sometime publish a more basic course on radiative transfer, The Generation and Transport of Radiation, which during many years was my second-year Bachelor-level introductory course at Utrecht University. It is summarized in the second chapter of the above lecture notes and covers the material in the first chapter of Radiative Processes in Astrophysics by Rybicki and Lightman, but much more extensively. There are no files available from this introductory course, but the Dutch-language course was translated into computer-aided English by Ruth C. Peterson (Santa Cruz) in 1992. In the absence of a web or book version you may try requesting a printed copy from the astronomers at Uppsala who sometimes produce a fresh batch for their students.