G. C. Sloan: Fun Astro-links

Fun Astro-links

Starting Points to Explore

Berkeley Science Education Gateway.
The Backyard Astronomer

NASA's Great Observatories

Hubble Space Telescope
- Space Telescope Science Institute - They operate the HST
- Hubblesite - produced by the Office of Public Outreach at STSI
- Hubblesite News Release Archive with many images
Compton Gamma Ray Obseratory
Home Page
Chandra X-Ray Observatory (AXAF)
Home Page Images Educational Materials
Spitzer Space Telescope
Home Page Education and Outreach

Human Space Exploration

General sources

The Mission and Spacecraft Library (formerly Mike's Spacecraft Library) gives a good over-all information source on rockets, probes, missions, and history (without the techno-babble).
The World Space Flight page provides a great wealth of information on crewed missions.

Space Exploration in the 1960s and 1970s

Kennedy Space Center history page

Mercury,

Gemini,

Apollo,

Skylab,

and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project

The Shuttle Era

The NASA Human Spaceflight page is the place to start
The Kennedy Space Center maintains a very extensive site on the space shuttle with mission histories and astronaut biographies.

Mir

The NASA Shuttle-Mir Page provides a good overview.
Also try the The Russian Space Web.

The International Space Station is easy to see from the ground at dawn and dusk. NASA shows you how.

Heavens Above will show you how to see many satellites.

NASA maintains a collection of Astronaut Biographies.

Probes to the Solar System

Here's some sites with images and results from some of the more important missions of the past decade or so:

The Cassini mission to Saturn
NASA's Mars Exploration Program
The Galileo mission to Jupiter (now just thumbnail images, but the full images can be found on other sites)

For images from previous missions:

Planetary Photojournal at JPL, looks to be the most complete compilation.
Another good site is maintained by the National Space Science Data Coordinated Archive at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Views of the Solar System by Calvin J. Hamilton, used to be great site, but now it seems too commercial.

Exoplanets: Planets around other Stars

We live in exciting times! I've pretty much lost count of the number of planets detected in orbit around other stars. Fortunately, other people are keeping track. There are two great sites to start with:

Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia - This is the original site, and it tends to be all inclusive, even at the risk of including some debatable detections.

Exoplanet Data Explorer - This site comes with great plotting tools and is more conservative about including confirmed planets. It was formerly known as the California and Carnegie Planet Search Page, and before that it was Geoff Marcy's Extra-solar Planet Page.

General Astronomy News

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