Links / Astro 130

Links: Astronomy 102

Here are some sites that can provide you news and lots of other links:

Vanderbilt's Dyer Observatory
Sky & Telescope's News Page
Nashville's Barnard-Seyfert Astronomical Society
The Hubble Space Telescope
The sci.space.news newsgroup posts press releases from astronomers and space missions. (This link may not open correctly, based on your ISP, but however you get to newsgroups, this is a good one.)
Some of Dr. Farris' images of the June 8, 2004 transit of Venus

There are several places on the net to get "tours" of the Solar System. Here's one of the best:

Jet Propulsion Laboratory's "Welcome to the Planets" with text and lots of images.
Students for the Exploration & Development of Space has an extensive tour of the Solar System.
The Hawaiian Astronomical Society has an extensive tour as well.

Here is a nice text summary of Ptolemy's model, as well as some of his other works.
Hipparchus' eccentric is illustrated here, along with other animations of the geocentric model.
Syracuse has a nice little applet that demostrates epicycles. You can vary the size and speed of the epicycle; it's pretty neat. Check it out and see if you can make retrograde motions. (Java required.) Another applet shows the equant.
Here's a brief but nice animation of Kepler's three laws.

Animation of the phases of the Moon
Applet to show orbiting is "falling sideways"
Astronomy Day 2003 talk at Adventure Science Center: A History of "Life on Mars"

Be sure to check out David Rosenthal's narration of his attempts view the southernmost rising of Venus from the Palace of the Governor at Uxmal over the pyramid at Cehtzuc.
This page has a low-intensity introduction.
A detailed introduction to the cycles of the Maya calendar
The Canadian Museum of Civilization has a fairly complete intro to the Maya.

There are hundreds of thousands of Stonehenge sites, and a few of them have good science.

This Earth Mysteries site has a good history of the building of Stonehenge and discussion of its possible astronomical uses.
This Mystic Places site is good.

Here's a German site (in English) that has a whole host of links to ancient astronomy web sites.
Here's a site the has both the Genesis and Maya creation stories together.

NASA has several planetary missions of interest. Check out the sites for these missions.

Here are a couple of links that have some good info or visualizations of our Galaxy and the Local Group around us.

Seds has a nice article about the Milky Way with lots of good links and images.
The Atlas of the Universe shows the solar system, the Galaxy, and out to the entire universe at different scales.
Goddard Space Flight Center has a nice infrared image of the entire Galaxy.
Seds also has some good info on the Local Group.

Physics and Astronomy Department
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN 37235
(615) 322-2828
E-mail Dr. Farris