External Links

Infra-red view of the Large Magellanic Cloud Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/M Meixner and the SAGE Legacy Team

online textbooks

• Nick Strobel's Astronomy Notes: a general first-year textbook
• Gene Smith's Astronomy Tutorial: at a level similar to PHY111
• Fiona Vincent's notes on Positional Astronomy: useful for Vik Dhillon's part of PHY105

useful stuff for the lab

• NASA's Planetary Fact Sheets: useful for checking physical and orbital parameters of the planets
• StaTable for Windows: downloadable package which calculates probabilities for a number of common statistical distributions. Useful for working out just how likely it is that your value is consistent with the textbook!
• Quickcalcs: an online statistical calculator: enter your mean and standard deviation and it will produce a probability table for you.
• The SIMBAD Astronomical Database: enter the catalogue number of a celestial object (and it's very broad-minded in what it will accept) and it will provide a list of useful information such as type of object, position, etc. Useful for checking spectral types of stars, for example.

observing

• Heavens Above: enter your location and obtain customised star charts, lists of planetary positions, visibility of satellites or the International Space Station, etc.
• Algol: Sky and Telescope's web page on the classic eclipsing variable star, complete with calculator for the times of the next few minima. A more general article from the same site covers 12 naked-eye variable stars.
• The VizieR Catalogue Service: a catalogue of astronomical catalogues! Probably more useful for 3rd and 4th year observing projects.

pictures

• Astronomy Picture of the Day: does what it says on the can - a different picture every day, with caption and links to further information. There are mirrors of this site all over the place: the link is to the UK version, which should usually be the fastest to load.
• The Moon:a particularly nice APOD showing the Moon through a lunar month.
• The HST press release site
• David Malin Images, including many famous photographs from the Anglo-Australian Observatory
• Images of the Sun from Big Bear Solar Observatory, California

miscellaneous

• Dan's Astronomy Software Collection: long list of downloadable astronomy software for a range of applications and operating systems