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.
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