Cool Astronomy Pages on the Web
- Astronomy Picture of the Day
- A site that highlights a new cool astronomy picture each day, either
because it's a particularly pretty picture, or because it says something
about recent research. A great source for background screens!
- Sky & Telescope
- Sky & Telescope is a popular astronomy magazine, sporting
news for amateur astronomers and reports on the latest in astronomical
research. The website has a lot of background information about looking
at the sky, and also features news notes about what the planets are
doing and other recent announcements in astronomy.
- Dyer Observatory
- Vanderbilt's public-outreach observatory is located about a 20-25
minute drive south of campus. It has a 24" telescope and some other
equipment, and holds public nights (which anybody can attend to hear a
public lecture and look through the telescope) twice a month except
during the winter. I will be taking interested members of this class to
the observatory for private viewing (with just those in our class) on a
couple of nights during the semester.
- The Barnard-Seyfert Astronomical Society
- A local amateur astronomy club. They run a number of events each
year, including the Tennessee Star Party,
which will be held September 26-28, 2003, at Camp Nakanawa (a 1.5 hour
drive from Nashville, under a nicely dark sky). If you want to see the
skies and the Milky Way in all their un-light-polluted glory, come to
this star party.
- Exploration @ Vanderbilt is an online science research website that highlights some of the various different science that is going on at this University.
- A Question of Planets: Article about Prof. David Weintraub's research about potentially planet-forming disks of material around very young stars.
- Supernova Cosmology: Article about Prof. Robert Knop's research about the accelerating universe.
- The Orion Nebula: Article about Prof. C. Robert O'Dell's's research about the the odds of planet formation in the Orion Nebula.
- Reach for the Stars: Biographical profile of Prof. C. Robert O'Dell.
- Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbot
- This is the text of the book from the Gutenberg Project. It was written by
Edwin Abbott in 1884. It describes the adventure of a square who lives
in a two-dimension Universe, when confronted with a sphere from a
higher-dimensional, 3D Universe. Not only entertaining, but useful, as
it helps you understand analogies about a curved 3-dimensional Universe
by thinking about what would happen in a curved 2-dimensional
Universe.
- StarStuff
- An astronomy news site, written for the general public.
- Bad Astronomy
- A site which debunks a lot of misconceptions and myths about
astronomy; it also reviews science fiction movies, pointing out just how
wrong they were....
- An Atlas of the Universe
- A site which has 3d maps of the stars near the Sun, the local
galaxy, the galaxies near the Milky Way, local clusters, etc. A great
way to visualize how far away things are and where things are in the
Universe.
- SkyView Virtual Observatory
- Download images from sky surveys performed by Astronomers over the
years. A very useful site for professionals and curious individuals
alike.
- Extrasolar Planet Websites
- http://exoplanets.org: California & Carnegie Planet Search
- http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/planets/: The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia
- Weather Websites
- Nashville Weather Forecast (from AccuWeather)
- Geostationary Satellite Server: Satellite maps in the visible and IR, so you can watch weather systems approaching yourself.