Welcome to the ADS Digital Library!

This service provides browsing capability to books related to Astronomy and Astrophysics which have been scanned and put online. We currently have the following books online: Each book has a table of contents and an index which can be used to get directly to a certain page or chapter. Once you are at a page, you can use the links beneath the image to continue browsing. These links allow moving to the previous page, the next page, the previous chapter, the next chapter, or back to the table of contents (TOC).

Alternatively, you can go directly to a given page or plate number. To go directly to a plate number, enter "Pxxxn" as the plate number, where "xxx" is the plate number with leading zeros, and "n" is an optional letter component. So, to get to plate 1, enter "P001" and to get to plate 12A, enter "P012A".

Printing the Paper:

In order to be able to automatically retrieve and print pages from the books, you will need to map the MIME type of the data returned by our server to the local printing program on your system. This sounds more complicated than it really is: if you are on a UNIX system, all you'll have to do is edit (or create) a file called .mailcap in your home directory and insert the following line in it:
          application/remote-printing;  lpr %s
if your machine is running a BSD-flavored version of UNIX (e.g. SunOS 4.x, OSF/1), or
          application/remote-printing;  lp %s
if you machine runs an ATT System V flavor of UNIX (e.g. Solaris 2.x, HP-UX, AIX). The easy way to figure this is knowing which of the commands lpr or lp works on your system and then use it in the above entry.

There are currently three options for printing these pages/chapters:

In order to decide which option to use, you must know some information about your printer and your browser. Direct printing of Postscript Level 1 will only work with a browser that correctly interprets the Content-Encoding flag in the MIME header returned with the data (currently only Mosaic 2.x is able to do this). Other browsers will try to send the compressed file to the printer, causing lots of gibberish to be printed and a few trees to be wasted. So if you're not using Mosaic and you need to print a Level 1 Postscript file, you should select "More Book Retrieval Options", "Save file to local disk", and then uncompress and print the file just saved. Under UNIX, the following command can be used:

          zcat retrieved_file | lpr
(Note: substitute lpr with lp whenever appropriate, see discussion above).

200 and 400 dpi (dots per inch) describe the output resolution of the page. 400 dpi is considerably slower than 200 dpi, but will give superior results, especially on plots and plates. In addition, the 400 dpi files are larger than the corresponding 200 dpi pages, and some printers will not have a large enough spooling area or physical memory to handle the higher resolution.

Level 2 postscript files are much smaller than their level 1 counterpart and will print considerably faster, so if you have access to a PostScript level 2 printer you should make sure to use it. If there is one of such printers on your local area network but it is not the default printer on your machine, you may want to consider modifying the entry in your .mailcap file to include the printer's name in the printing command, e.g.

          application/remote-printing;  lpr -Php4 %s

Additional Book Retrieval Options

In addition to browsing and printing the book, there are additional options available from the "More Book Retrieval Options" page.

This page allows users to choose between retrieving an entire chapter of a book, or a single page. In addition, users are asked to choose where to send the results and to choose an output format for the results: