Pathways to Astronomy 5th Edition by Steven Schneider

Pathways to Astronomy 5th Edition by Steven Schneider

Print ISBN: 9781259722622, 1259722627

eText ISBN: 9781260012699, 1260012697

By: Steven Schneider

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Higher Education

Print ISBN: 9781259722622, 1259722627

eText ISBN: 9781260012699, 1260012697

Edition: 5th

Copyright year: 2018

Pathways to Astronomy breaks down introductory astronomy into its component parts. The huge and fascinating field of astronomy is divided into 86 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 assign them in different orders or skip certain units altogether. Professors can customize the units to fit their course needs. They can select individual units for exploration in lecture while assigning easier units for self-study or they can cover all the units in full depth in a content-rich course. With the short length of units students can easily digest the material covered in an individual unit before moving onto the next unit

NEW TO THE FIFTH EDITION

In addition to our own monitoring of new and interesting

results in the field, many

readers and reviewers offered excellent suggestions for updates and improvements

to Pathways. One of the more challenging aspects of revising the text is that we

want to address new topics and improve the clarity of the presentation without

letting the text become needlessly longer. Sometimes new results, such as the data

on Pluto from New Horizons, allows us to replace old speculative material. Other

results, such as the wealth of new material on exoplanets from the Kepler mission,

require some expansion of the text, but we have made other adjustments to keep

the text from growing substantially longer.

In all, more than 100 figures were added, updated, or replaced throughout the

book to improve clarity and to include some of the best new images available.

More than 50 new Test Yourself questions were also added. The Unit topics

remain the same as the third and fourth editions, although a few Unit sections

were shifted. Notably, in light of the growing compositional information on

asteroids from the Dawn spacecraft and other sources, we shifted the section

on meteorites from Unit 50 (“Impacts on Earth”) to Unit 43 (“Asteroids”). We

also shifted a few sections within Units as discussed in the detailed notes below.

We used information gleaned from LearnSmart, McGraw-Hill’s adaptive learning

program to aid in the revisions. LearnSmart links readers’ responses to questions

about the content to the sections of the text where the question’s subject

matter is discussed. We focused revisions on the topics that students found most

challenging.