Textbook

Pathways to Astronomy  by Stephen E. Schneider & Thomas T. Arny. Either the full version or the separated Stars and Galaxies (Volume 2) version should be fine. It is also OK to have either the 1st or the 2nd edition.

• 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.