 Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy. In this lecture we are going to introduce a series that I'm going to be working on for the next couple of months on astronomy of other cultures. And we will discuss a little bit about what's going to be covered in this series. So what we're going to look at and talk about is that in general astronomy is studied from a western perspective. We talk about the Greek astronomers and we jump into the Renaissance. And we sometimes talk about some of the early things like Stonehenge. But we don't always look in as much detail about some of the other cultures that have developed a significant astronomy as well. So that's what we're going to look at here. We're going to start looking at some of these other cultures. And in this series I am just selected for. That doesn't mean that they're the only ones or necessarily the most important ones. We are going to look at these four in a series of a couple of videos for each talking about the different contributions they've made to astronomy. And what I've selected to do are the Babylonians we will talk about and look at some of the very early history and some of the very early recordings that we have. And some things the way we developed our number system based on the Babylonians. We will look at the Egyptians and the pyramids and talk about those as to how they could be used for astronomical purposes. We will look at some of the early Chinese recordings and some of the material that has been studied there. And some of the very early discoveries that were made by Chinese astronomers long ago. And then finally the fourth one we will look at is the Mayan civilization and their contributions to astronomy including pyramids as we see here. Much like the large Egyptian pyramids that we also will talk about later. And we can see again how some of these cultures have tied everything tied into astronomy because of the way the sky had a very strong importance for the very early people who developed these types of structures. So this series will continue, we'll start next week and we will start off looking at the Babylonians and spend a couple of weeks going over a little bit of the basics of some of this Babylonian astronomy and how that ties into our modern astronomy. So just to summarize here what we talked about again astronomy we often look at that from a western perspective and we want to look at a few of those other cultures. So we're going to look at these other cultures and their contributions to astronomy. And again I've selected four cultures and it is not intended to be a complete study of all cultures. Perhaps in the future I will expand this to other cultures as well that were not specifically included here. So that concludes this introduction to astronomy of other cultures. We'll be back again next time to start our studies in more detail here. So until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.