The development of man's understanding of planetary motions is the crown jewel of Newtonian mechanics. This book offers a concise but self-contained treatment of this historically important topic. After opening with a review of Kepler's three laws of planetary motion, it proceeds to analyze the general dynamics of "central force" orbits in spherical coordinates, how elliptical orbits satisfy Newton's gravitational law and how the geometry of ellipses relates to physical quantities such as energy and momentum.
