A Tour Through My Links

.....On the side of my page, I've listed a number of astronomy-based links.  For this post, I thought that it would be fair to examine why I have chosen to list these sources, and what value the reader (as one interested in astronomy) or the reader (as one interested in astronomy education) might find these web sites useful.

.....The first one on the list is the Astronomy Picture of the Day.  In addition to providing a cool new image every day, in addition to giving something that I have often used as a topic of discussion before class, in addition to one of the people running it being someone I knew from Michigan Tech, each day's image has a comprehensive set of links that serves very well as a way to get background material on the topic at hand.  One of the biggest problems I've found when moving into a new topic is when you don't know enough to ask good questions.  APOD gives you a number of ways to explore questions that you didn't realize you should be asking.  The only downside to APOD is that the search function allows no fuzziness at *all*.  If you don't get the spelling or word order exactly correct, your goal will be missed.



.....Next is Heavens Above.  Once you have specified where you are (at the very top, I prefer selecting "from database", which then leads you to pick your country, then search for your town.  Once this done, you have many options.  Under "Astronomy", you can always call up a star map that you can set for any date and time you wish.  Sadly, my "The July Sky" cannot do that.  What I use more frequently is the "Satellites" section.  For example, I note that Winona gets no good views of the International Space Station over the next ten days, and that the brightest satellite that I can expect to see on Wednesday night will be a Chinese rocket body.

.....The Interactive Scale of the Universe is simply fun.  Once it loads, by moving "in" and "out", you can examine the sizes of objects from the Planck length to the Universe.  (I paused, deciding whether or not to capitalize "universe".  My conclusion was that if I did not, why capitalize anything?)  




.....My primary use of SpaceWeather.com is to look at their image of the Sun, to see if there are any sunspots to observe.  (Just to be consistent, never, never, NEVER look at the Sun without using filters specifically and explicitly designed for this purpose.  Unless, of course, you feel that you have more eyes than you really need.)

.....Including Stardate, produced by McDonald Observatory, keeps me from simply cribbing their stuff and going back to Facebook.







.....The Messier Pro is my other blog, and the posts in Suburban Observing will appear in the Messier Pro as well.  The difference is that Suburban Observing is following something on a plan (no, really!), and that plan involves the first run through the sky focusing on the constellations before we look at the things that are in those constellations.  As I do make sketches and maps of the cool objects that can be found in a small telescope, I will post those on the Messier Pro.

.....The Sky Survey result of the night sky is a wonderful zoomable map, on which you can seek out photos pf the constellations and deep sky objects that we will look at here.  The difficulty is that my maps are based on how the stars appear in the sky from mid-northern latitudes, while this map is plotted against the galaxy, which is tilted at quite some angle in the sky.


.....While it has no direct connection to astronomy, you should also check out The Messy Apron, because it's cool.  C'mon, everybody's gotta eat.