Astronomy Resources for Learning & Research

[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/user/10516082170111880850/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:

https://www.physicsforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=68&daysprune=-1&order=desc&sort=replycount

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

Very basic tutorials:

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

http://www.astro.washington.edu/users/anamunn/Astro500/tutorials_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/Graphical_timeline_of_the_universe => amazing graphical timeline of the entire temporal scale of the universe

 

[Simfish]

http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/Cyberia/Expo/cosmos_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/ASTROTOOLS/astrotools.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/showFeed?ui=45mu4&mi=3fndc3&ai=su&jc=energy&type=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/Richard_Easther/Home.html - really cool professor webpage on cosmology

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

 

[Simfish]

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

http://www.cracked.com/article_19117_7-horrible-ways-universe-can-destroy-us-without-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-good-astronomy-astrophysics-resources-tools, since the format on Quora is more conducive to edits. Feel free to suggest more links though!

 

[piareround]

Any youtube or open courseware video lectures on there for teaching Stellar Astronomy?

 

[CowedbyWisdom]

Thanks for the links mate! Here is something really exciting! FREE intro to astronomy online course from Duke University.
https://www.coursera.org/course/introastro

 

[homer]

I took that Duke course and got the certificate, and it's amazing. edx has a four course astrophysics sequence taught by Brian Schmidt (Nobel Prize for discovery of dark energy) starting March 25th.

https://www.edx.org/course/australian-national-university/australian-national-university-anu-1347

 

[Alicelewis11]

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

I would like to say Thanks for sharing such a nice video. What a superb collection.