Hi everyone, this is an overview video of the Astronomy Second Edition book from OpenStacks, a free to access, free to download textbook for our courses. So I wanted to show some of the versions or formats that you can access this book in. So when you search, when you google search Astronomy OpenStacks Second Edition or if you go to OpenStacks.org and then you search for it in the Science tab, you'll see this nice bright blue astronomy book and that's the one that we're using. I'm going to show you the online version first. So when the book loads, one thing I'm going to point out is that you are not required to have any kind of account in order to be able to see the whole textbook, but I am signed into an account that I've made and that allows us to actually make highlights and notes. So if you highlight anything, you'll be able to choose a color that you want to highlight it in and a note that you want to make with it and anything that you make a highlight for will be displayed and saved and you can search by the different colors that you made and you can print them all either as a paper copy or as a PDF and it's it's a really nice tool if you're going to be using the textbook. A lot of students find that helpful. Not everybody needs to. One of the other nice things about the online version of the book is in the search bar. You can just search for anything that you're interested in. So if we want to look up solar flares, we can type what we want and then hit search and it will show us all the places where solar flares are described. And if you go through what you'll see is they're also indicated with a little bit around them so that you have some context for what you're looking at and then you can click on the one that you want and it will bring you to that and highlight the search terms that you that you were looking for. So the highlighting feature is really nice. The search feature is really nice. We're going to look at the kind of layout of any particular chapter. So if you in the table of contents hit the chapter name, it opens up all the different pieces. Thinking ahead is the introduction to the book and to get from one section to the next, you can just hit the word next. The learning objectives are always helpful to give you a sense of what's in that section and then we've got figures and tables and all sorts of useful things to look back at. I always find that a textbook is most useful as a reference so that if you want more information about something you can look it up rather than feeling like you need to read all all words at the very beginning for a science textbook at least. So as you go through, you'll see all these cool things and there are links outside links that will provide more learning, all sorts of cool things. At the end of each chapter is a summary of the key terms. This can be really useful to be looking at as we finish up lecture videos or in-class instruction for a particular chapter or idea. You can make sure that these terms make sense to you or if there's a term that we didn't talk about in class, maybe it's useful to understand even if it's not part of our focused curriculum. And you're always welcome to check in with me about anything that you want more information about. The summary is also really useful to use as a kind of review of what we've learned. Make sure that you feel comfortable with what we've covered. And as I will note fairly often, the textbook has a lot more information than what we cover in a single semester survey course. So these summaries might give you extra information that you're not that you're not needing to know for our assessments and learning, but can be very helpful for kind of deepening your understanding and seeing the big picture. The four further explanation, an exploration in each section gives you some articles and websites. These can be particularly helpful when we have projects. If you're trying to get more information, these are kind of self-selected and curated sources and they can be very helpful if you are working on a project on a particular topic. And then the collaborative group exercises might be helpful for you to be thinking about things in more depth. I typically don't assign them in our current versions of the course, but they are certainly useful to be to be thinking through. And then there's different types of exercises that again can help deepen your understanding. Make sure that you feel comfortable with things if there's ever a question you come across that you don't think that you could answer. We can always talk about it together in discussion or in student support hours. If you ever have a question about the textbook formatting, please let me know, but I think this online version is pretty straightforward and has a really nice layout overall. All right, I'm going to show you a different way to access this textbook that I think is also useful to know about. And that other version, that other way of accessing the textbook is to download a PDF. So once you download it and you go to your file, it'll open up in whatever PDF viewer you typically have. So once it's all loaded, it is just as complete as the online version. However, the really nice thing about having this PDF is once you've downloaded it to your device, it is yours to be able to reference for as long as you'd like. And you have full legal rights to be able to keep that file on your device even after this course is over. And it didn't require any kind of account to be able to download the PDF. And it is just as searchable as the online version was. So I want to highlight a couple of differences. So for the book here, we have the table of contents eventually. And the nice thing about the table of contents is each one of these is a clickable link to the PDF itself. I want to note that the PDF is full of links and there are two different types of links. One, which will take us away from the book. And so to follow it, we would have to have an internet connection at that time. It gives us the URL that it's taking us to in case we want to write it down for later in case we don't have internet access at the time that we're looking at that particular item. However, the versions or the links themselves that don't have a URL are simply within the book one section to a different section. So for example, Earth, Moon, and Sky is chapter four in the book. So clicking that will bring us to chapter four and allow us to see all of these different connections between the topics that we are seeing as we go through the course. So it can be very helpful as you are watching lecture videos and seeing things that you that you want to have a little more information about to access the textbook in whichever form and recognize that it is showing us how things connect together and maybe when we're going to learn about more for a particular idea or object. For different PDF viewers, there may be different tools you have access to. One thing that all of them should have is if you hit control and then hold that while you hit F, it brings you to a search feature as well. It is not as robust as the online version of the book, but if we were to type something we wanted to find in the textbook, it may take a little bit, but it will be able to search for that term. So I typed that in, I pressed enter and now it's starting to find all the different times that the search term, which I pick solar flare, comes up in the book and we see that it's chapter 15 similar to what we were seeing earlier in the video. And as we scroll through, we'll see that it is also still highlighting as we find them. It is still highlighting those different versions of the text solar flare when it comes up. I'll press next so it finds it for us. The one difference is on the PDF that search tool is just finding exactly what I typed rather than solar by itself or flare by itself, like the online search feature did, which was giving us kind of partial options as well as the complete phrase. No matter how you access the textbook, the thing I want us to understand and hopefully be a little bit excited about is that there are lots of different ways that we can access this information and the online and PDF versions of the textbook are completely free. And if we wanted to buy or rent a print copy from the bookstore, much less expensive than some of the traditional publishers, the book comes in color, hardback versions and black and white paperback versions and you will not really save much by getting the black and white paperback versions. When it gets printed in paperback like that, it's actually in two separate volumes. So it looks like a much bigger book and there are so many images and astronomy that really benefit from being in full color. So I caution you against buying on your own the black and white paperback version of the book. The bookstore only has the hardback or should only have the hardback color version, which is the better version and is not significantly more expensive than the paperback. If you have any questions as you're going through the textbook or any of our other lecture materials, please always be willing to reach out and I hope that this was a useful introduction to our textbook.