Book and Journal Catalogue
Search the online catalogue for books and journals held in the RAS Library. Early printed books are in the process of being added to the catalogue, so please contact the library and archive team with any enquiries about this part of the collection.
Archive Catalogue
The Catalogue of the Archives and Manuscripts of the RAS is available on-line, including a full listing of the Herschel Archive of papers by William, John and Caroline Herschel.
Biographical Information
You can search the index of published obituaries of Fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society dating back to the 1820s. You might also be interested in this list of the first 200 members of the RAS compiled by Professor Mike Edmunds. We have an extensive guide to other sources of biographical information on astronomers.
Journal Articles
The journals of the RAS are fully Open Access:
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
- Geophysical Journal International
- RAS Techniques and Instruments
Fellows of the RAS are entitled to free online and print access to the Society's bimonthly magazine Astronomy and Geophysics, and Friends of the RAS are entitled to a discounted subscription. Please contact the Membership Officer for more information on how to access A&G magazine. If you are not a member of the RAS but wish to access an article in A&G, please contact the library and archive team.
The RAS does not provide currently access to paywalled online journals published by other organisations.
If you want to search for astronomical literature online, the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a great place to start and many of the journals it links to are open access. ADS is a database operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and funded by NASA. It contains over 12 million records of articles on astronomy, astrophysics, geophysics and physics, including all issues of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1827 to the present day, and other Royal Astronomical Society publications. It is a good resource for both current research and history of astronomy.
This short ADS tutorial video shows how to get started, or you can download a PDF guide to the ADS.