What is a Comet: A page I made in 1996 with information on the origin and nature of comets.
What Does a Comet Look Like: Also from 1996, this page describes what a comet appears like to the naked eye or through a telescope eyepiece (as opposed to in an overexposed photograph)
Comet Hyakutake: A collection of information and links on the Great Comet of 1996. Unfortunately, most information on this comet has expired from the internet.
Comet Hale-Bopp: A collection of information and links on the Great Comet of 1997.
Comet Photography Page: Contains scans of photographs and drawings I made in 1996 and 1997 of Comets Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp.
The Galactic Center: An image I made of the Galactic Center in infrared using the SkyView Virtual Observatory at the Goddard Spaceflight Center.
The undying mission to Jupiter and Saturn is now the Voyager Interstellar Mission, and their web site on VRAPTOR has information about it and links to nearly every other major space site of interest. True to it's name, this is the best place to start an interstellar mission on the Internet.
The University of Arizona Students for the Exploration and Development of Space home page. UASEDS did a marvellous job several years ago acquiring and using grant money to produce educational materials, including this web site, which is one of the premier places to start looking for information on space sciences.
The Planetary Society supports and sponsors planetary exploration and related space missions. Their site has information on these efforts and the current status of most NASA and international Solar System missions.
The Nine Planets. This is a fabulous archive of data on and images of Solar System objects. The top page is an organized list of links. Follow to the planet of your choice to learn about almost anything about the planets.
The Planetary Data System. This is the JPL space exploration database and most awesome space image site on the web. It can be difficult to navigate unless you are familiar with NASA data jargon. Follow the link to the Imaging Node for the image archive and search engines, or follow to go straight there.
The National Space Science Data Center. This is similar to the PDS site. It has links to several other archives and image galleries. You can also order raw data on CD ROM.
The JPL Planetary Photojournal: a graphical interface for requesting solar system images. This is a good place to start looking for images if you don't want to dig as much.
The NASA photo gallery: an older version of the Photojournal.
The PDS Planetary Image Atlas: a page of links to several NASA sites, organized by planet, where you can find graphical image browsers. The Magellan Venus browser linked to here is the oldest and by far best. One of these days, the Mars engines will hopefully work as well.
The Space Telescope Science Center main page. This has links to public images, the data archive, information about the telescope, and observing/scheduling forms. The latest HST public release pictures can be found here.
The Hubble Heritage Project is a project of the HST science center to display some of the best Hubble telescope images for the public. The HST Nuggets Home Page has been removed!!! It HAD a selection of quality HST images that do not usually appear on the STSCI web pages.
The JPL Site Map.
This is an extensive list of links to JPL sites and related
sites of interest.
The Sun:
SOHO: The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. This is a beautiful project and a marvellous site. These images are amazing. There are also videos of starquakes, comets hitting the Sun, etc. SOHO is a multi-spectral observatory in solar orbit.
TRACE, the Transition Region And Coronal Explorer. This spacecraft produces high-resolution images and movies of the sun in many wavelengths. These images are unbelievably spectacular.
Genesis Home Page. Genesis is a current mission to collect particles from the solar wind and return them for analysis. The page has excellent information on the sun in it's "Science" section.
Ulysses/NASA Home Page. Originally known as the "Solar-Polar" mission, this joint NASA-ESA spacecraft orbits the Sun over its poles, collecting particles and field data.
Earth:
The Shuttle Imaging Radar (SIR) Images Page and the NASA/JPL Imaging Radar Home Page both have extensive collections of radar images of Earth. The latter has an interesting quiz page.
GOES-8
Weather Images. This is the source of satellite photos
used by your local meteorologist. These 100 to 1000K .jpg images can be
spectacular.
The Moon:
Apollo
Lunar Surface Journal: This site has images from the
Apollo program.
Mercury and Venus
Magellan Mission to Venus (JPL)
Venus
- Magellan Image Data. This is a graphical link
to the Magellan (Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar) spacecraft's map
of Venus. A global map allows you to choose a region then zoom into a specific
square of Venus Radar image. It's a weird planet.
Mars:
The Federation of American Scientists Mars Life Page. This has good general information on Mars, the possible discovery of life in Martian meteorites, and links to other good Mars sites.
The JPL Mars Hub. This site has links to past, present, and future robotic Mars missions.
Mars Pathfinder, launched in late November 1996, provided striking views of the Martian Ares Valles in the Summer of 1997. You can access an archive of images and information about the project at this page.
The Mars Global Surveyor Home Page. MGS is presently in orbit about Mars. It is returning data and preparing to produce a global map of the planet accurate to a few meters. Images and news are available.
Mars Odyssey 2001. This most recent mission will map the planet in infrared and study the high energy radiation environment of Mars.
Jupiter and its Moons:
Project Galileo homepage: Find out what is happening at Jupiter this week.
Cassini Jupiter Science Page. The Cassini spacecraft flew by Jupiter in December 1999. Science results are described here.
Outer Planets:
Cassini mission homepage. Saturn, the future of the U.S. planetary program. It also has the most realistic space art in existence.
Cassini News. Find out the latest happennings aboard the Cassini spacecraft.
Asteroids:
NEAR: the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous project. This spacecraft orbited the asteroid Eros from February 14, 2000 until February 12, 2001, when it landed on the surface. The site has multitudes of images and geological data on Eros, and images of asteroid Mathilde, passed in 1997.
Asteroid and Comet Impact Hazard: a NASA information source on the projects to find asteroids or comets that might hit the Earth and the hazards of such an impact.
Comets:
What is a Comet? and What does a Comet Look Like? are two pages I produced in 1996 to provide information on Comet Hyakutake. You can get basic information on comets from there.
The JPLComet Observation Home Page. This is where to go to find information on new comets and comets currently visible. The site has ephemerides, images, and general information.
Comet Hale-Bopp, the Great Comet of 1997, was the sky spectacular of that year. The best source of information about this comet is the Comet Hale-Bopp Home Page at JPL.
The JPL Comet Hyakutake Home Page. Comet Hyakutake was better, but its appearance in 1996 was so sudden that most people never saw it.
My Comet Hyakutake Page and my Comet Hale-Bopp Page have links to sites of interest on these comets.
My Comet Photography Page links to pictures that I took of Comets Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp.
Deep Space 1: This new technology mission flew by Comet Borrelly on September 22, 2001. Its chief attraction was originally its ion drive, one of the most efficient methods of spacecraft propulsion, but the spacecraft's Borrelly images turned out to be the highest resolution images ever taken of a comet.
STARDUST.
The Stardust spacecraft, launched in 1999, will rendezvous with Comet Wild II in January, 2004, and collect samples of its coma for return to Earth in January, 2006.
Extrasolar Planets:
Extrasolar
Planets Encyclopaedia - As pf December, 2001, ver 75 planets have been found around other stars, most of them large (Jupiter-sized) planets in small, fast orbits where they are detected by spectroscopic perturbations. At thiss ite you can find out about these observing techniques and the known planetary systems.
Stars and Astrophysics:
Nebulae and other Extended
Objects:
Neutron Stars:
Black Holes:
Galaxies:
Halton C. Arp'sCatalog
Of Peculiar Galaxies. All of these galaxies are peculiar,
meaning that they have an unusual shape or are associated with exotic radio
or x-ray sources.
General Relativity, Cosmography,
and Cosmology:
Just Plain Weird:
Current BATSE
GRB Catalog. GRB = Gamma-Ray Burster. They're bright, they're fast,
they're "gamma colored" and nobody has a clue. This site is technical and
may be difficult.
The SkyView Virtual Observatory at Goddard. This is a spectacular database. It contains data from about 40 sky surveys in many wavelengths and will display the data as an image of a region of the sky that you select. You can produce three-color (RGB) images using a separate wavelength channel for each color. You virtually need to use the "Advanced" options menu since the "Basic" and "Non-astronomer" options both default to a difficult to understand and antaesthetic color scheme when displaying images. Click here for an image I produced of the center of the Galaxy in infrared.
Large Telescopes:
a site with links to the largest observatories on Earth.
The largest Telescopes are:
The European Southern
Observatory's Very
Large Telescope (VLT). This is the Big One, destined
to be the largest in the World. The site now has marvellous images on display.
The W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawai'i.
The Hobby-Eberly
Telescope (HET), a joint project in West Texas. This
is the Spectroscopic Survey Telescope, designed specifically to produce
spectra of faint objects at low cost.
Subaru, the Japanese 8-meter on Mauna Kea.
The Russian
Special Astronomical Observatory. For
years this 6-meter monster in the Caucuses was the largest telescope in
the World.
Palomar
Observatory, site of the famous 200 inch Hale telescope.
I also include a giant under construction: The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mnt. Graham in Arizona will consist of two 8-meter telescopes working as an interferometer.
Astrophotographs
by Jerry Lodriguss. These are the best amateur pictures
I've found so far.
The Kennedy Space Center homepage.
NASA Human Spaceflight, This page consolidates American Space Shuttle and International Space Station information.
RosAviaKosmos, the Russian Aviation and Space Agency, maintains this English web site. If you are Win-1251 and Russian literate, go here. This may be virtually obligatory, as the english pages are rarely updated.
The Deep Space 3 orbiting interferometric telescope.
Ice and Fire, WWW site for proposed JPL missions to Europa, Pluto and Charon, and the Solar Corona. These will all likely be approved by Congress. The Europa Orbiter is the second of a series of missions that will (hopefully) culminate in a Europa submarine.
JPL Space Very Long Baseline Interferometry Project This is the home page for the VLBI radio interferometry project, which presently produces the highest resolution images of outer space.
JPL Omega: spacebourne gravity-wave interferometer, AKA geometrodynamic telescope, and you figure that with JPL's name on it, this is really going to do the job.
CONTOUR, the COmet Nucleus TOUR, to be launched in August, 2002, will encounter comets Encke in November, 2003, and Schwaßmann Wachmann III in June 2006.
Der Deutsche Forschunganstalt fur Luft-und Raumsfahrte, the German space agency.
Institut Kosmicheskikh Issledovanniy, the Russian Institute for
Space Exploration.
Le Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, the French Space Agency.
Austin Astronomical Society Links Page
The Flandrau Science Center: the planetarium in Tucson, Arizona which finally (really?) hooked me on Astronomy
3-D Starmaps. This site has a multitude of online star charts and databases for use in looking at the stellar neighborhood from the outside.
The Star Catalogue Selection Page has links to various kinds of online star catalogues.
Mike Boschat's Astronomy Page has a massive alphabetical listing of sites.
The JPL Space Calendar, which has a twelve month listing of astronomical and astronautical events with links. Find out when that obscure science mission you've never heard of is launching.
The Space Telescope Science Institute's Digitized Sky Survey form