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Astronomy 162: Introduction to Stars, Galaxies, & the Universe Prof. Richard Pogge, MTWThF 9:30 |
The topics are arranged by the units I used when I teach this course. Students enrolled in the other sections of Astronomy 162 instructors should have no trouble following them, as I follow the rough order of topics as the basic syllabus we all use.
This set is not nearly as extensive as the links for Astronomy 161. I always welcome email with suggestions for new links, or to report stale or broken links.
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.
http://www.skypub.com/whatsup/whatsup.html
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:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
What's New this week in the world of astronomy? Sky & Telescope provides a page for you to find out the latest news:
http://www.skypub.com/news/news.html
The Space Calendar, maintained by Ron Baalke at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Find out what's happening in the Space sciences (rocket launches, shuttle activities, satellites, space probes, and more):
http://NewProducts.jpl.nasa.gov/calendar/
The NASA Gallery, a gateway into NASA's electronic archives of pictures, videos and audio clips, and public affairs information:
http://www.nasa.gov/hqpao/library.html
An incredibly complete resource for exploring the History of Astronomy, compiled by the Astronomische Gesellschaft at the University of Bonn:
http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~pbrosche/astoria.html
Interested in purchasing an amateur telescope? Here is an excellent set of frequently asked questions compiled by Ronnie B. Kon, and posted on the homepage of the Atlanta Astronomy Club. Opinionated to be sure, but also unquestionably thorough and thoughtful. Read before you buy!
http://www.mindspring.com/~aleko/scopefaq.txt
Some of the finest color images of the heavens have been obtained by master astrophotographer David Malin and his collaborators at the Anglo-Australian Observatory using a variety of telescopes. Here is a general catalog of their on-line images:
http://www.aao.gov.au/images/index.htmlReturn to the Index
http://astro.estec.esa.nl/SA-general/Projects/Hipparcos/hipparcos.htmlA concept for the successor to Hipparcos mission is ESA's GAIA project (for Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics). The goal is a factor of 100 greater accuracy for stars as much as 100 times fainter than those measured with Hipparcos. Possible launch dates are 2009 and 2014 (if they go ahead with the concept). Check out their web page at:
http://astro.estec.esa.nl/SA-general/Projects/GAIA/gaia.htmlThe practice of measuring precise positions of stars is called Astrometry. An exacting art, one of the principal centers for astrometry in the U.S. is the U.S. Naval Observatory Directorate of Astrometry:
http://aries.usno.navy.mil/ad_home/ad_homepage.htmlAn interesting overview of the many types of binary stars, with a history of their recognition, can bey found at this link:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/dept/physics/astro.1997/astro20/For those of you with a JAVA-aware browser (e.g., Netscape 3.0 and above), Terry Herter at Cornell has set up some great binary star simulators. Now if I could coax these to work in lectures...
Binary Star Orbit Simulator:
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/~tlh10/java/binary/binary.htmEclipsing Binary Star Orbit Simulator:
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/~tlh10/java/eclipse/eclipse.htmReturn to the Index
http://www.astro.uva.nl/michielb/od95/A JAVA-based Stellar Evolution Simulator developed by Terry Herter and collaborators at Cornell. Pretty good:
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/~tlh10/java/evolve/evolve.htm
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/billa/bb/inline.htmlThe Planetary Nebula Sampler maintained by NOAO astronomer George Jacoby:
http://www.noao.edu/jacoby/pn_gallery.htmlA gallery of spectacular planetary nebula images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope:
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/PR/97/pn/
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/billa/twn/The Messier Catalog is a list of 100 objects that appear diffuse or fuzzy when viewed through a small telescope. The catalog was compiled by French Astronomer Charles Messier between 1758 and 1782, primarily as a guide to comet hunters so they would not mistake these objects for comets (which also appear diffuse or fuzzy through a telescope, but have the important distinction that they move from night to night and usually develope tails). They have become popular objects for amateur and professional astronomers alike, and include a mix of diffuse nebulae, star clusters (which look like single fuzzy objects at low magnification or poor seeing conditions), and galaxies. Here is a good overview of the Messier Catalog:
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/messier/Messier.htmlAnother collection of images of Messier objects, this one at the University of Oregon:
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/messier.htmlImages of supernova remnants from the Anglo-Australian Observatory
http://www.aao.gov.au/images/general/supernova.html
http://www.gti.net/cmmiller/blkmain.html(A version of the above without frames)
Take a Virtual Trip to a Black Hole or Neutron Star, courtesy of Prof. Robert Nemiroff at the Michigan Technical University. The pages below are at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/htmltest/rjn_bht.htmlA nice Black Hole Frequently Asked Questions page maintained by Ted Bunn at the Center for Particle Astrophysics:
http://physics7.berkeley.edu/BHfaq.htmlSpacetime Wrinkles, produced by the Numerical Relativity Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, is a bit more advanced, but quite good. Images, graphics, and very well-written text describing black holes:
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/NumRelHome.htmlStephen Hawking's homepage at The University of Cambridge:
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/hawking/home.htmlReturn to the Index
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/diamond_jubilee/debate_1920.htmlQuestion: What do you get if you point the Hubble Space Telescope for 10 consecutive days at part of the sky chosen to be as "empty" as possible?
Answer: The Hubble Deep Field (or HDF for short), one of the deepest image sets yet of the universe.
Far from empty, the images in 4 colors show the Universe to be lousy with galaxies. A real gold mine for astronomers:
http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdf/hdf.htmlSo successful was the HDF project, that there are plans for a second deep-field, this one in the southern sky. Below is the Hubble Deep Field South project page:
http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdf/hdfsouth/hdfs.htmlDoug Welch at McMaster University has a web page devoted to Cepheid Variables stars discovered by the MACHO microlensing search. A beautiful plot of the Period-Luminosity Relation for the Large Magellanic Cloud.
http://wwwmacho.mcmaster.ca/Demos/Cepheids/WebPL.htmlA set of beautiful images of galaxies obtained by master astrophotographer David Malin and his colleagues at the Anglo-Austrailian Observatory. These are among the finest images available (many of which appeared in the course lectures courtesy of David Malin & Coral Cooksley at AAO):
http://www.aao.gov.au/images/general/galaxies.htmlMore Galaxy Photography by amateur astrophotographer Jason Ware. His photo of Andromeda (M31) is probably the finest image yet of the nearest bright spiral galaxy to the Milky Way:
http://www.galaxyphoto.com/The Hubble Space Telescope has provided some of our clearest views yet of galaxies. Visit the Galaxy image index maintained by the Space Telescope Science Institute's Public Information Office for articles (mostly press releases) about galaxies near and far:
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/Subject.html#GalaxiesA nice overview of the question of Dark Matter at the NSF-sponsored Center for Particle Astrophysics at UC Berkeley.
http://physics7.berkeley.edu/darkmat/dm.htmlThe Las Campanas Redshift Survey (LCRS) gives redshifts for 26418 galaxies in a pair of northern and southern hemisphere fields covering approximately 700 square degrees, making it one of the most extensive maps of the large-scale structure of the "local" Universe yet. Visit their homepage:
http://manaslu.astro.utoronto.ca/~lin/lcrs.htmlOther redshift surveys with webpages:
http://www.astro.ubc.ca/people/scott/theory.htmlThe Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite homepage at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
http://spectrum.lbl.gov/www/cobe/cobe.htmlThe COBE Mission Homepage at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
http://space.gsfc.nasa.gov/astro/cobe/cobe_home.htmlThe Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) satellite is a successor mission to COBE which will map the cosmic background radiation with unprecidented angular precision. Visit the mission website at the Goddard Space Flight Center for more details:
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/The Grand Challenge Cosmology Consortium (CG3) is an NSF-sponsored project to promote the use of parallel computing for exploring the origins of galaxies and large scale structure in the universe. Consortium member institutions include Princeton, MIT, Illinois, Indiana, UC Santa Cruz, Pittsburgh, and the NCSA and PSC supercomputer centers.
http://zeus.ncsa.uiuc.edu:8080/GC3_Home_Page.htmlThe National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has sponsored an electronic exhibition entitled Cosmos in a Computer as part of its Science for the Millenium Multimedia Online Expo. An very nice virtual tour of the role of supercomputers in theoretical cosmology.
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/Cosmos/CosmosCompHome.htmlThe N-Body Shop at the University of Washingtion is an interdisciplinary collaboration using High Performance computing to simulate galaxy and structure formation. Lots of info, pictures, and movies (some of which are mirrored on this site and were shown in class).
http://www-hpcc.astro.washington.edu/Joshua Barnes, a professor at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy and one of the world's leading experts on numerical simulations of galaxies, has put together a nice set of pages on interacting galaxies entitled Galaxy Transformations. This includes lots of images, movies, and interesting explanations (some of the lectures are very technical):
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/faculty/barnes/transform.htmlReturn to the Index