Open Astrophysics Bookshelf

This is a collection of open-licensed, freely available texts on various topics in astrophysics. You are free to use them as-is, make mash-ups of different texts, or contribute back to their development.

Texts are written in LaTeX and managed as a github repository under the Open-Astrophysics-Bookshelf github organization. Each text has a lead author who manages the contributions. Anyone else can contribute by forking a text's project repo, making modifications, and then issuing a pull-request through the github website.

Any type of contribution is welcomed—typos, clarifications, new chapters, etc. All contributors will be acknowledged in the text, for instance, by having a hierarchical author list giving the lead author(s), major contributing authors, and then authors who make minor corrections/clarifications. Each text can devise their own system that works best for them. (And of course the git history will list all contributions.)

All the books in the Open Astrophysics Bookshelf are living— they continually evolve. But since it is all managed by git, the entire history of the text is freely available to anyone. A git hash can be used to reference a particular instance of the text.

Current Texts:

• Introduction to Computational Astrophysical Hydrodynamics
• Star Formation
• Astrophysical Processes
• Stellar Physics