Search for Life in the Universe

Freshman Seminar 113, Butler College, Fall 2004

Interesting links of relevance to this course

Please let me know if there are other relevant links I should put here.

General Astronomy References:

  • Princeton University Observatory and Library
  • One Universe, a website with the full text of an excellent intro astronomy text, plus exercises and other supplementary material.
  • Physical and astronomical constants
  • Astronomy HyperText Book , which includes links to course notes of some relevance to our course.
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive; loaded with beautiful pictures.
  • Astronomical Image Library. You can find pictures of essentially any astronomical source here.
  • Also don't forget Google's image finder.
  • Comprehensive list of astronomy links sorted by category.
  • Home page of the Space Telescope Science Institute. Look here for all kinds of nifty things related to the Hubble Space Telescope.
  • Hubble's official online science web site.
  • Introduction to Cosmology, part of the Microwave Anisotropy Probe Education and Outreach program, developed largely here at Princeton.
  • New Wright's Cosmology Tutorial. An excellent beginner's resource.
  • The Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics, online.
  • Gene Smith's astronomy tutorial. Quite a bit of depth here.
  • John Baez's Physics FAQ (for the more ambitious).

    NASA and related sites:

  • NASA's home page
  • The Planets Home page. A great place to start for armchair exploration of the solar system! Does not have much in the way of links to external resources.
  • The Nine Planets: A multimedia tour of the solar system.
  • NASA's Solar System photo album,, full of great pictures.
  • Map-A-Planet, from the US Geological Survey.
  • Astrophysics in Cyberspace Lots of stuff about Mars, extrasolar planets, all kinds of goodies.
  • The Mars Global Surveyor Home Page
  • The Mars Odyssey Home Page
  • The Mars Spirit and Opportunity Home Page
  • Galileo's mission to Jupiter
  • Martian Meteorites and the search for life.
  • Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), a proposed NASA mission.
  • Princeton's involvement in TPF.
  • NASA's Astrobiology site.
  • The Kepler Mission to find planets around other stars by their shadow effect
  • The Virtual Planetary Laboratory.
  • Skyview; a virtual telescope

    The Search for Extraterrestrial Life:

  • Searching for Extra-Solar Planets, from Geoff Marcy's group at Berkeley.
  • The extrasolar planet encyclopedia
  • The home page of The Planetary Society.
  • Page of links compiled by the Planetary Society; there is a lot here.
  • Astrobiology: The Living Universe, a fantastic website put together by high-school students (!), with about 400 pages of useful information.
  • An astonishing image of the Earth at night. See also here for information on the problem of light pollution.
  • SETI Institute This includes quite a bit of useful information, and links to the entire SETI research community.
  • Headquarters for the Mars Society, a bunch of Mars enthusiasts.
  • The Astrobiology Web.
  • The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home, an effort to use screensavers to help process data taken for the SETI program.
  • A discussion of the Snowball Earth hypothesis.

    Out in left field:

  • Is the Earth being bombarded by small comets?
  • The Panspermia home page.
  • The Sky is falling! Links to sites discussing cosmic catastrophes of various sorts.
  • Contact, the movie, home page.
  • UFO believers' sites
  • James Randi, professional skeptic
  • The Skeptical Inquirer, a journal devoted to debunking.
  • Phil Plait's discussion of bad astronomy in the media and in general.

    Web sites of useful journals:

  • Sky and Telescope. An excellent source of astronomical news, and articles on subjects relevant to the course.
  • Scientific American. Also full of relevant articles.
  • Science News. Their articles are short, and very up-to-date.
    This file was constructed by Michael Strauss; send me mail.