Links for Further Exploration: Astronomy 161

Astronomy 161:
An Introduction to Solar System Astronomy
Prof. Richard Pogge, MTWThF 9:30

Solar System of Cosmas Indicopluestes,
6th century CE

(Credit: Andrew Wiesner, U. Penn)

Selected Astronomical Internet Links

This page presents selected Internet links to provide students in Astronomy 161 with some good starting points for their own explorations of Astronomy on the Web.

The topics are arranged in the order I usually follow when I teach Astronomy 161. Students of other 161 instructors should have no trouble using these links as I follow the basic order of topics as the basic syllabus we all use.

You can browse the whole document, or use the Index below to jump to a particular category. The primary links are given by the highlighted URLs offset from the text.

Disclaimer
All annotations and comments reflect my personal opinions, and do not reflect the views of The Ohio State University or anyone else official or otherwise represented by someone wearing a suit. Inclusion of a link does not constitute an endorsement. Corrections and comments are always welcome.

General Interest

What's up in the sky this week? Find out at this page created by the publishers of Sky & Telescope Magazine:: This Week's Sky at a Glance
Astronomy Picture of the Day! Every day a different picture from astronomy and space sciences is posted along with explanatory text written by the contributor. This service comes courtesy of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center:: Astronomy Picture of the Day (APoD)
What's New this week in the world of astronomy? Sky & Telescope provides a page for you to find out the latest news:: News from Sky & Telescope
The NASA Multimedia Gallery, a gateway into NASA's electronic archives of pictures, videos and audio clips, and public affairs information:: www.nasa.gov/multimedia
A good resource for exploring the History of Astronomy, compiled by the Astronomische Gesellschaft at the University of Bonn:: www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~pbrosche/astoria.html

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Topical Links

Unit 1: Introduction

coming soon...

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Unit 2: Discovering Earth & Sky

An Interactive Earth Viewer. Kind of slow, but a very cool way to view our planet.

www.fourmilab.to/earthview

How do we measure the Earth & make maps today? Find out at the OSU Center For Mapping:

www.cfm.ohio-state.edu

The Time Service Department at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Wasington, D.C. is the official source of time used in the United States.

tycho.usno.navy.mil

A Walk Through Time is an overview of the Evolution of time keeping technologies brought to you by the The National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST, an agency of the Technology Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/time.html

An excellent overview of the Gregorian Calendar, written by Prof. Albert Van Helden at Rice University.

galileo.rice.edu/chron/gregorian.html

Eclipses of the Sun & Moon are among the most spectacular of naked-eye phenomena. The definitive information site for past and future eclipses is the Eclipse Home Page maintained by Fred Espinak at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/eclipse.html

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Unit 3: Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs

Prof. Albert Van Helden, a noted historian at Rice University, has put together an exceptional WWW project on the life, science, and times of Galileo Galilei called the Galileo Project. It is co-authored with Elizabeth Burr

galileo.rice.edu

A number of fine biographies of the astronomers we've met in this unit may be found on the web through the Astronomiae Historia pages maintained by the Astronomische Gesellschaft in Bonn, Germany. Here is where the links start for each (note these are whole pages in alphabetical listings): of

Nicolaus Copernicus
Tycho Brahe
Johannes Kepler
Galileo Galilei
Sir Isaac Newton

An excellent short biography of Isaac Newton, adapted from Richard Westfall's biography (Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton [1980]), provided by the Newton Institute at the University of Cambridge:

www.newton.cam.ac.uk/newtlife.html

A short, illustrated biographical sketch of Tycho Brahe from a site in Sweden:

www.nada.kth.se/~fred/tycho

Here is a collection of pictures of physicists, many of whom we've discussed in this class, as well as a few you will meet later in Astronomy 162:

charm.physics.ucsb.edu/people/hnn/physicists.html

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Unit 4: Matter, Light & Gravitation

While there is not much by way of webpages describing the more technical material we've covered in this unit, since we ended by talking about telescopes and observatories, I have decided to put in the following links to Astronomical Observatories around the World.

Ground-Based Observatories

Space Observatories

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Unit 5: The Earth & The Moon

Read what James Ussher (1580-1655), Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, had to say himself about how he computed his date for the creation of the Earth. Contrary to what is often portrayed, he didn't "count begats" in the Bible. It's a shame most modern writers in cosmology who seem to go out of their way to make fun of Ussher only succeed in making themselves look foolish because they won't take the time and trouble to bother to actually read what he wrote. The good bishop would have been appalled by their sloppy scholarship...

www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/ussher.htm

The United State Geologic Survey (USGS) in Menlo Park, California is the central agency dealing with Geology and Earth Sciences in the public trust. Here are some particularly interesting USGS Links:

Earthquake Central

quake.wr.usgs.gov

A webpage with some graphics on Continental Drift, featuring the Grand Canyon:

www.kaibab.org/geology/contdrft.htm

Database of Earth Impact Structures maintained by the Planetary and Space Science Center of the University of New Brunswick Canada:

www.unb.ca/passc/ImpactDatabase/index.html

The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has a very nice page on Lunar Exploration:

Lunar Exploration

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Unit 6: The Family of the Sun

General Solar System Links

There are a number of hypertext tours of the Solar System on the Web, here are three good ones (in no particular order):

The Nine Planets

Welcome to the Planets (NASA JPL)

Views of the Solar System (in 5 languages).

The Planetary Society in Pasadena is an organization dedicated to promoting the exploration of space and the search for extraterrestrial life. Since their founding in 1980, they have become (in their words) "the largest non-governmental organization on Earth."

www.planetary.org

They have a really nice "what's new" page for space exploration news:

www.planetary.org/html/what-is-new.html

Topical Links

This is an index to the many Planetary Exploration programs run by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena detailing all of its various space missions:

www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions

Mercury

Messenger, the MErcury Surface Space ENvironment GEochemistry and Ranging mission, was launched in August 2004. Using a complex series of gravity boosts from Earth and Venus, it made three fly-bys of Mercury in Jan 2008 through September 2009, and then settle into orbit in March 2011.

messenger.jhuapl.edu

Venus

Project Magellan, the very successful radar mapping mission to Venus (that almost didn't fly because of Congressional budgetary fights!). Here's the main homepage of the Magellan Project at JPL:

www.jpl.nasa.gov/magellan

Mars

We are currently in the Golden Age of Mars Exploration using robotic spacecraft. To start your explorations, visit the Mars Exploration Program website at JPL:

mars.jpl.nasa.gov

This is the official portal for all of NASA's ambitious Mars exploration programs.

Jupiter

The Galileo Spacecraft orbitted Jupiter and explored the Jovian system from December 1995 until it was sent diving into Jupiter in September 2003. Here's the project homepage at JPL in Pasadena with the results from this remarkable mission:

Galileo Mission

Saturn

Cassini-Huygens is a joint US/European mission to Saturn was launched on October 15, 1997 and settled into orbit around Saturn in June 2004. Since then it has continued to send back incredible pictures of the Saturn system, and successfully released the Huygens probe into the murky atmosphere of the giant moon Titan where it landed in January 2005 and lasted for 2 hours 27 minutes. You can follow the progress of this mission and learn more at

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm

Cassini is currently in the extended Equinox mission phase.

Pluto and Beyond

Pluto has been in the news a lot lately as it was reclassified as a dwarf planet in August 2006, befitting its role as one of the largest of the Trans-Neptunian Objects. The New Horizons Mission was launched in January 2006 for a rendezvous with the Pluto-Charon system in July 2015, and then a later exteded mission to explore the Kuiper Belt from 2016 through 2020 (and beyond if it survives).

pluto.jhuapl.edu

Comets

Comets come and go quickly. Who knows when the next great comet, like the recent Hale-Bopp, will come along. Check out the Online Comet Page maintained by the folks at Sky & Telescope Magazine to find out:

Comets at Sky & Telescope

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Final: Worlds Beyond The Solar System?

Are there planets beyond the Solar System? Long-time searches for Extrasolar Planets have thus far found hundreds of planets around other stars, mostly Jupiter-like gas giants, but we are starting to close in on Earth-sized rocky planets. Things are changing so fast, it is hard to keep up, a few links to the most definitive sites:

The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia by Jean Schneider of the Observatoire de Paris gives a very nice overview of the search for Extrasolar Planets:: exoplanet.eu
is a good clearing house for recent discoveries, always up to date.
Exoplanet Searches:: NASA Kepler Mission; Geneva Extrasolar Planet Search Programmes; California Planet Survey; Microlensing Planet Search (OSU)

Life on Other Worlds?

If there are Earth-like planets around other stars, could such worlds also harbor life? And if life, could there be intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe? Probably no other question in astronomy captures the imagination of the general public as much as this one.

SETI stands for [The] Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Coined in the 1960's, SETI is a particular framework that has evolved in which various people are searching for artificial electromagnetic signals from technologically-advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. Discussion of SETI runs the gamut from the deeply skeptical to the ardently hopeful (scientifically, that is, there is a subset of the frankly dotty, but we won't go there). It is a subject that has nothing whatever to do with UFOs (which is the only time you'll see that word mentioned on these pages!). Below is a very select set of links to discussions of the question of SETI. These are meant as gateways to explorating this topic, and is not an exhaustive overview.

The SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, is a professional organization conducting scientific research on the question of Life in the Universe, with particular attention to the searching for electromagnetic evidence of technological life. I think that this is the best SETI page on the Web for those looking for a good, general, no-nonsense source of information:

www.seti.org

The Planetary Society also maintains a site dedicated to the SETI project:

planetary.org

The SETI League, Inc., not to be confused with the SETI Institute (see above), is a non-profit, member-supported educational and scientific organization pursuing SETI projects. One of their primary and unique activities is to organize a network of amateur radio astronomers into a world-wide search, including technical specs for building receivers and related equipment.

www.setileague.org

Last, but not least, the folks at Sky & Telescope Magazine have put together a very nice and uptodate page on many current SETI topics. New and definitely worth a look:

www.skyandtelescope.com/resources/seti

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