Astronomy Resources on the World Wide Web

The Web is littered with public-interest astronomy pages; astronomy is a science that has wide public appeal. Less well known are the many resources available for the professional astronomer. Astronomers do more and more of our work on-line. This assignment will introduce you to these resources.

OK - Let's get started!
 

Web Assignment 1: Astronomy Pictures

A fantastic resource on the Web is the availability of pictures of the universe. For example, every image that the Hubble Space Telescope has ever taken is available for any astronomer to use. Also, there is a collection of All-Sky Surveys taken at many bands in the EM spectrum (radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, xray). Our assignment will be to pick an object to study in detail, and get pictures of it from as many different sources as we can.

Start by picking an object from a list, and then look it up at the Digitized Sky Survey, an electronic verison of an old photographic all-sky survey. Then, you will look at the object in radio, infrared, ultraviolet and xrays. Finally, we will see if HST has taken an image of it.

Click here to pick an object and begin the assignment


Web Assignment 2: Astronomical Literature

One thing astronomers do a lot of is read (and write) journal articles. These journals are peer-reviewed, meaning that any article submitted for publication is first sent to an astronomer who is familiar with the topic. This astronomer scrutinizes the author's work; the methods, the data, the results and conclusions. If the reviewer OK's the manuscript, it gets published. Otherwise the author must address the reviewer's concerns and resubmit it.

There are many peer-review astronomy journals. Here are a few:

There are many others. Why do you think there are so many? Part of it is geographical/political. MNRAS is a British journal; A&A is European; AJ and ApJ are American. But, anyone may submit an article to any journal. Another reason is topical. For instance, A&A traditionally deals more with stars than galaxies or cosmology. The biggest reason there are so many journals is that there are so many articles to be published! Nobody can read all the articles written in astronomy today. You could speed-read 24 hours a day every day, and still not keep up. So, you have to specialize, and learn one subject deeply, or learn a little of many subjects.

Anyway, on to the assignment at hand. The Abstract Server Only a few years ago, there was no systematic catalog of astronomical literature on the internet. The first major step in this direction was the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS). ADS provided a computer database of all astronomy articles ever published in peer review journals! The database includes all necessary reference information (Title, Author name(s), Journal title, Subject keywords, volume and page numbers, year of publication) as well as a short abstract, or summary of the article. Of course, the database can be searched by all of these parameters. This made literature research much more efficient.

OK, let's see how this works. Follow the next link to ADS. If you have a frames-capable browser, it will open the ADS home page at Harvard University, with a little window at the top to give you step-by-step instructions. If you can't do frames, it will take you to the instructions page, and you will have to make prodigious use of the back button to review them (or print it out before moving on). So, let's go!

Click here for ADS


Web Assignment 3: Hey Baby...What's your sign?

Another great resource on the web, for professional and amateur astronomers alike, are various sites where you can custom-make a star chart for any time and any location.  If you're planning to go take a look at the stars on a particular night, one of these charts can tell you what constellations and planets are visible, as well as other interesting objects like clusters, nebulae, and other galaxies.

For this web lab, we're going to use one of these facilities to illustrate a point.  Your zodiacal "sign" is determined by which of the 12 constellations of the zodiac the Sun was in on the day you were born.  Almost everyone knows what their zodiacal sign is, but did you know that which constellation the Sun is in during any given month is slowly changing over the course of thousands of years?  This means that if during late October of this year, the Sun is in the constellation Scorpius (it is not), then a couple of thousand Octobers from now it will have moved out of that constellation, and into another. This is because the Earth wobbles or precesses around its axis of rotation, which causes the background stars that make up the zodiacal constellations to change their apparent positions with respect to the Sun. So as the Earth wobbles, the Sun appears to change which constellation it's in.

Does this sound believable? Let's check it out by taking a look at your "true" astrological sign.

Click here to make a star map for your birth date.


Web Assignment 4: The Astronomical Almanac

Oftentimes, professional and amateur astronomers need to collect data about the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars - information in a more accurate form than what can be gotten from the kind of star chart you generated in part 3.

Click here to go to a site with several options for finding positional information.


Web Assignment 5: Maps of the Earth

Cartographers have been making maps of the earth for thousands of years, but none offered the perspective currently attainable through satelite mosaics. Here you will take a look at a few different "real time" mercator projection maps of the earth taken with satelites.

Click here for satelite maps of the earth.


Web Assignment 6: Astronomical Scavenger Hunt

So far we have taken you on a guided tour of astronomy resources on the Web. What if you were interested in looking something up that we did not just cover in this lab? For instance, in class we have touched on numerous topics that may have sparked your interest and now, being the inquisitive, knowledge hungry student, you want to know more. In this case, you would need to turn to a general search engine.

Click here to start a websearch.


Post-Game Wrap-Up

Wasn't that fun? Hopefully you now have a good idea of what resources are available to astronomers on the web, and how to use them to some degree. Just to make sure you've covered everything, follow this next link to get a list of all the printouts and questions you should be handing in.

Click here to get the assignment summary.


waters@ucolick.org
Last modified: Thu Mar 5 17:06:06 1998