I assume anyone who visits this blog, or at least anyone who comes back, has an interest in science, space and astronomy. With that in mind I thought I’d take a moment to tell you all about some of the web sites I like to visit, these are a few of my favourite things.
I guess the best place to start would be NASA’s main page. Now this page is pretty general, intended for students and the general public but it does allow you to access to information on every mission NASA has ever undertaken. Seriously, there’s a lot of good stuff to be found here.
Another NASA site, which actually isn’t easy to get to from their main site, is “How to spot the Station” which allows you to get detailed sighting information to find the International Space Station as it flies over your head. I’ve seen that station now over thirty times and it’s always pretty cool
http://spotthestation.nasa.gov
And if you like NASA you’ll love the Jet Propulsion Labouratory (JPL) in California. Their main page is also general interest but again, if you look around there’s a lot to see.
JPL also has a really cool site that’s hard to get to from their main page. This is the small body database. Orbital and physical parameters for thousands (it’s growing all the time) of small asteroids and other objects in our solar system. It takes a little bit of figuring out but I really love the orbital diagrams, especially for Near Earth Objects (NEOs). Caution, the orbital applet is JAVA enabled so you need JAVA on your computer.
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi
There are now several commercial sites that are also worth checking out on occasion. The best known is Space.com which is a news site dedicated to the latest happenings in space.
A new one, as far as I know, is Spaceflight insider. This site also has space news but it also has a launch calendar of upcoming launches from around the world.
http://www.spaceflightinsider.com
One last cool space site is SpaceWeather.com. Yes there is a web site dedicated to giving you the latest weather report from our solar system. A couple of interesting things to see here are the latest sun spot report, the solar wind and cosmic ray intensities and near Earth asteroid approaches during the next month.
Now let’s change course a little bit and look at some astronomy sites. I guess a nice segue would be the main web site for the Hubble space telescope. You can spend days just going through the beautiful images.
One of my favourite sites is the SEDs Messier data. Charles Messier was a French astronomer about the time of our revolution who was studying comets. Well he made up a list of fuzzy objects that weren’t comets. The objects on that list turned out to be galaxies and nebula and star clusters and supernova remnants. The SEDs site has tons of beautiful images of these objects.
A daily astronomical note of interest can be found at Stardate.org by the McDonald Observatory in Texas. They often have information on things to see in the sky tonight.
Another observatory with a cool web site is Keck in Hawaii. Again plenty of beautiful images.
http://www.keckobservatory.org
A great commercial site is Sky and Telescope magazine. The best part of their site, as far as I’m concerned, is the interactive sky chart which can show you what the sky will look like anywhere in the world not just for tonight but for any night for the next hundred years. Oh, and the last hundred years as well. Lemme tell ya, I’ve planned many nights of stargazing using that site. This is also a great place to look for telescope and accessories to buy.
http://www.skyandtelescope.com
This getting to be a bit of a long post so I think I’ll save Physics and Paleontology and Archeology for a later date. I have one more site for today and it’s possibly the most interesting. Back in the 1960s Jodrell Bank Radio observatory in Manchester England discovered the astronomical objects know a Pulsars. Well Jodrell Bank has a web page where you can hear, that’s right hear the sound of collapsed stars only a couple of kilometers across that are spinning so fast that they generate a magnetic field so huge it shoots out a radio beam like a searchlight and every time that beam passes Earth Jodrell Bank hears a click. So go to this site and listen to the sound of a dead star.
http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/research/pulsar/education/sounds
You may have noticed I haven’t even mentioned Science Fiction. Don’t worry, I get ’round to it.