Astronomical Links

• Princeton Astronomy Department, Princeton University Observatory and Library
• Chris Chyba's home page
• Anatoly Spitkovsky's home page
• Michael Strauss' home page
• The Rose Center for Earth and Space.
• Search for Life in the Universe, the home page of a course Michael Strauss taught in Fall 2004. Lots of further links there.
• Princeton Astrobiology Club.
• A prediction for the clarity of the night sky in Princeton.

General Astronomy References:

• The Cosmic Perspective, the web site for the Bennett et al. textbook.
• 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 and its 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 (mostly emphasis on planetary astronomy):

• 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.
• 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

• Searching for Extra-Solar Planets, from Geoff Marcy's group at Berkeley.
• The home page of The Planetary Society.
• 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.

  Out in left field/for fun:

• James Randi, professional skeptic
• The Skeptical Inquirer, a journal devoted to debunking.
• DOOFAAS (Dumb Or Overly Forced Astronomical Acronyms Site)

• Dark Matter Rap, by David Weinberg (Princeton PhD, 1989).

• Astrobiology rap.

  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.

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