Astronomy resources

Simfish

Most of the sites here aren't very helpful for learning astrophysics. However, they are amazingly useful for learning more about astronomy in general (and many cover far more than what you will find in any book or textbook)

http://www.solstation.com/ - amazing amounts of detail for many stars

http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/sowlist.html

http://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/

http://www.3dgalaxymap.com/

http://galaxymap.org/drupal/node/23 - amazing maps

For site discovery, this really helps: http://www.google.com/search?q=related:solstation.com (or just google related:[domain address for any astronomy website you really like])

Blogs:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/...0/label/!astro - My astronomy blogroll - note that I tend to be more into the technical side and less into the popular side of astro so you won't see "Bad Astronomy" in there.

Basically, for the technically inclined (but not overly so), some of the best blogs are at http://invaderxan.livejournal.com/, http://www.centauri-dreams.org/, http://lifeunbounded.blogspot.com/, http://exoplanetology.blogspot.com/, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/, http://blogs.zooniverse.org/galaxyzoo/, and http://oklo.org/.

Crowdsourcing astronomy: (the stuff you do is very basic, but the papers are quite technical)

http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

Link Directories:

http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/links.html

http://www.reddit.com/r/astro (reddits also have their own discussions, and are very up-to-date)

http://www.reddit.com/r/space

http://www.reddit.com/r/astronomy

http://www.delicious.com/tag/astronomy (huge numbers of links, some very nice, many trivial. But at least very up-to-date [like reddit])

Also, a very interesting way to see the more interesting discussions is to arrange them in order from "most replies" to "least replies". Here are some examples:

http://physicsforums.com/forumdispla...ort=replycount

http://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/top/

Very basic tutorials:

http://donald.phast.umass.edu/~arny/indextut.html

http://www.astro.washington.edu/user..._astro101.html

Others:

http://mysite.du.edu/~jcalvert/index.htm - not much astro, but really amazing for fields necessary for astro

Simfish

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/resources/camb_tool/index.html
Build a Universe with the CMB Power Spectrum Analyzer - Nice visualization
http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/toolbox/
LAMBDA - CMB Toolbox Overview
http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/toolbox/tb_cmbsim_ov.cfm
LAMBDA - SIM Overview
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/resources/edlinks.html
Wilkinson Microwave Microwave Anisotropy - Suggested Links

Simfish

http://background.uchicago.edu/index.html

Amazing CMB tutorials (at multiple difficulty levels)

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm

==
Also interesting: http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/cmb/pipeline.html

http://bolo.berkeley.edu/~yuki/CMBpol/

Simfish

http://exoplanet.eu/

Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia (has tutorials too)

Simfish

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic...f_the_universe => amazing graphical timeline of the entire temporal scale of the universe

Simfish

http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/Cyb...osmos_nav.html => Very nice tutorial on cosmology, even readable for middle school students (I used it for a presentation in middle school)

Simfish

http://pds-rings.seti.org/ => Lots of raw technical info on all the outer planets (and the probes used to study them)

Simfish

http://www.astro.columbia.edu/~arlin...strotools.html => Departmental Tools - very nice list of lots of astro tools

http://www.astro.washington.edu/astrotools.html => another list of tools, but not as comprehensive as above

Simfish

http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~matzner/svc/resources.html => Resources for the ambitious undergraduate or beginning graduate researcher in astronomy & astrophysics

Simfish

http://gaialab.asu.edu/exoplanets/# => amazing exoplanet classification (using the Sudarsky system). Amazing visuals as well

Simfish

http://www.annualreviews.org/action/...=etoc&feed=rss

Annual Reviews in Astrophysics (the papers here are a lot more readable than the papers in most journals - they just give a summary of what was hot in the past year)

HeLiXe

This is so great :) Thanks Simfish.

HeLiXe

Here is one that I keep in my favorites :)
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/index.html
I've found it very informative. Astronomy 162: Stars, Galaxies and Cosmology

Simfish

Sure. :)

http://astrobites.com/ => research-based blog, summarizes the text at level friendly for undergrads (better to read in a RSS feed reader though)

http://easther.physics.yale.edu/Rich...ther/Home.html - really cool professor webpage on cosmology

http://astrobites.com/2011/02/14/ast...sites-to-love/ => another astro website directory

Simfish

http://www.galaxydynamics.org/home.html => nice visualizations of galaxy dynamics

http://www.cracked.com/article_19117...t-warning.html => doesn't sound authoritative, but WOW, it actually goes deep in the literature and finds some pretty amazing stuff

http://astrobiology.ucla.edu/pages/research.html

Simfish

Amazing planetary science lecture slides:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/~bagenal/3750/

Simfish

Okay just a note: I'm going to move my updates to http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-g...esources-tools, since the format on Quora is more conducive to edits. Feel free to suggest more links though!