Acknowledgements¶
This book is written as a set of jupyter notebooks, rendered as HTML pages using Sphinx and the nbsphinx extension (note that I use a slightly customized version of sphinx available here). Python interactivity is added using thebelab, which connects the page to a free binder kernel. The setup for this binder kernel is in the jobovy/galastro-binder repository. The thebelab support was inspired by and partially-based on the code in jupyter-book’s sphinx-book-theme.
I am grateful to the many students who have used drafts of this book at various stages as part of the “Galactic Structure and Dynamics” class at the University of Toronto in 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2024 and to other readers of different draft versions, for their advice, constructive feedback, and for pointing out many minor and less minor mistakes in the text and Python code in earlier drafts. Hearing from students about how helpful earlier drafts of this book were for them provide essential motivation during the many years when I was writing it. I am particularly grateful to Roberto Abraham, Brett Andrews, Albert Bosma, Rimpei Chiba, Susan Clark, Bryan Gaensler, Tobias Geron, Daniel Gilman, Norman Murray, Pieter van Dokkum, and David Weinberg for helpful discussions and to Irene Abril Cabezas, Stuart Anderson, Mike Boylan-Kolchin, William Cerny, Mark Chappell, Barry Chiang, Mark Dodici, Salvatore Ferrone, Francesca Fragkoudi, Michael Gagen, Kyle Kabasares, Jens Kleimann, Nolan Koblischke, Zhaozhou Li, Qing Liu, Jonas Mueller, Surhud More, Gabriel Pfaffman, Markus Possel, Cian Roche, Alicia Savelli, Hayato Shimabukuro, Anika Slizewski, Pal Szabo, Scott Tremaine, and Kuan Wang for pointing out various errors and inconsistencies in the text, code, and HTML/CSS/Javascript implementation of the online version of this book. This book would not have been possible to write without the arXiv and especially the NASA/ADS infrastructure and I am grateful to NASA/ADS staff, in particular Kelly Lockhart, for help with technical issues. I am also grateful to my editors at Princeton University Press—Jessica Yao for encouraging me to make this an actual book and leading me through the proposal process and Abigail Johnson for encouraging me to finish the book and guiding me through the final submission process.
Finally, I would like to thank my family—my wife Phoebe and two wonderful daughters Annabel and Francesca—for their continuous love and support.
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