Free for every student
Stardust & Shortcuts
A 291-page illustrated guide to astrophysics — written for students who want the real physics, the actual numbers, and an honest account of what the work involves.
Published by Alpha Web Innovations and released free under a Creative Commons licence. Download it, print it, put it in a school library, hand it to a student who cannot buy one. You do not need to ask us.
- 291
- pages
- 38
- chapters
- 75
- diagrams & photographs
- ₹0
- for everyone, forever
Why we made it
A fourteen-year-old deserves a better answer
This book began with my own son. He is fourteen, and he decided he wants to be an astrophysicist. I went looking for something that would take that decision seriously — real physics, real numbers, an honest account of the work — and found plenty written down to him, and very little written as though he might one day do it.
So we made this instead. Almost everything in these pages was discovered by someone who began exactly where a student begins: curious, under-equipped, and unwilling to accept “nobody knows” as the end of a conversation.
We are giving it away because the students who most need a good science book are the least likely to be buying one. There is no sign-up, no email capture and no catch — just a file, and an invitation to pass it on.
Girish ManchandaFounder, Alpha Web Innovations Private Limited
What's inside
Thirty-eight chapters, and nothing dumbed down
Written for bright students around Class 9 and upwards — and for any adult who wants the real version.
Worked problems, with answers
Every chapter has a calculation you can actually do. No calculus required, and all solutions are given in an appendix.
Indian astronomy, in full
Aryabhata, the Kerala school and Meghnad Saha through to Chandrayaan-3, Aditya-L1, LIGO-India and the new private space industry.
An honest career map
The olympiad route, IISER versus the JEE path, where to find summer research — and the truth about how scarce academic jobs are.
Look inside
Built to be looked at, not just read
Thirty-five original diagrams and forty photographs from NASA, ESA, ISRO, JAXA, CNSA and the Event Horizon Telescope.
The licence, in plain English
Yes, you can just take it
The book is © Alpha Web Innovations Private Limited, released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 licence. Without writing to us for permission, you may:
What you may not do is sell them, charge for access, or publish an altered version under someone else’s name. Attribution must stay with the work.
The photographs inside carry their own licences from NASA, ESA, ISRO and others — all listed in Appendix E.
Teaching a class, running a library, or want a batch printed? Write to gm@alphawebin.com — we are glad to help, and there is nothing to pay.