Textbook

Pathways to Astronomy, Stars and Galaxies (Volume 2)  by Stephen E. Schneider & Thomas T. Arny

• available at Textbook Annex on Campus and at the Jeffery Amherst Bookshop.
  
• Electronic version is also available at http://textbooks.zinio.com/. Type “schneider” in the search box, and the book should come up for a price of about $44.
• Textbook Website: for animations, interactives, and self-study quizes (click on Self Study near the top of the page to enter)
• The textbookthe free Software Starry Night Planetarium Software, which will be used in class.

This textbook is designed more like a series of mini-lectures instead of a monograph of the entire field of astronomy. The same material covered in other introductory astronomy texts is included, but this is broken up into smaller self-contained units. These units are woven together to flow naturally for the person who wants to read the text like a book, but it is also possible to read them in different orders, or skip certain units altogether.