Acknowledgments

We are indebted to our contributors, Drs. Baraff, Chervenak, Childers, and Jones. In addition to contributing Hacks of their own, they also reviewed everything we wrote and made numerous helpful additions, suggestions, and corrections. Thanks to their help, this is a much better book than it would otherwise have been.

We also want to thank Mark Brokering at O'Reilly, who got the ball rolling and kept us on track. And without Brian Jepson, our editor, this book would never have seen the light of day (or the dark of night). Thanks, guys!

Thanks are also due to Al Nagler, the founder of Tele Vue Optics, Inc., who came to our rescue on very short notice when we desperately needed an image of a top-quality refractor for the front cover. The cover photograph is a Tele Vue-NP101 101mm f/5.4 apochromatic refractor on an ash-wood Tele Vue Gibraltar mount, a world-class instrument that any astronomer would be proud to own. For more information, visit the Tele Vue web site at http://www.televue.com.