This page will contain hyperlinks to sites containing information that may be of interest to astrophysics students, none of this material will be required for class, although of course, some of this material may contribute to your knowledge of astrophysics in general.
Journals/Current Astrophysical News
- ADS Abstracts Service: If I assign you some journal reading, this is the place to go to retrieve the journal articles. In the main American journals, anything older than about 3 years old is available online for free. Current articles from current journals are linked to from my current astronomy and astrophysics article pages.
- astro-ph Preprint Server: Preprints of "cutting edge" work ... no peer-review is necessary, which means some completely goofy stuff are available here. In some modern peer-reviewed journal articles you will see references in astro-ph/###### in the references. I automatically list current astro-ph articles on this page.
- Astronomer's Telegram: In the older days observatories recieved telegrams about new objects appearing in the sky. The tradition continues in this online version today. I list the last 5 telegrams on the astronomy newsfeed.
Online Astronomical Catalogs and Services
- Minnesota Automated Plate Scanner Catalog of the POSS I: Because you professor has no shame, he links to his own catalog of the entire nice sky as visible from California first. Easy to use and it links to the next three services listed below automatically.
- SIMBAD: This service tracks astronomical catalogs and cross-links them with each other. Relatively easy to use.
- NED: The "NASA Extragalactic Database" is an excellent source of information on almost any object outside of our own galaxy.
- SkyView: If you want to see what part of the sky looks like in almost any wavelength, this is the site for you. An awesome service for scanning older all-sky surveys.
- USNO Astronomial Almanac: Need to know when some planet is going to rise, when the sun will set, or when the seasons will occur. The US Naval Observatory's website is the place to go.
- JPL Horizons: When you need positionsof solar system objects with extreme accuracy, this is the place to go.
Programming and Problem Solving
- Belfry's SciCalc: Although designed for the iPhone, this website bascially provides you with an online scientific calculator. Great for those situations where you might be without calculator.
- Numerical Recipes in C: Need to look up how to do something mathematical in the C programming language, this is the place to go, even if they did port most of the code from FORTRAN.
- PGPLOT: This is one of the standard plotting libraries in astronomy. Relatively easy to use, but you need to know how to program in C or FORTRAN. If you care to, you can access it from perl using PGPERL.
- IDL Astronomy Libraries: IDL is probably one of the more common programs used in astronomy for data analysis and we happen to have a site license, so these libraries for astronomical functions within IDL may interest you.
- Maple 11 is now licensed for campus use (MSUM
students can
obtain a copy for free here) and it might be helpful to learn to
use it for attacking your homework.
- Maple Applications Center: This website provides a ton of links to well documented Maple worksheets covering a wide variety of applications. I have included links to some of my favorite specific examples below:
- Maple Essentials: A fully interactive course for becoming a Maple user.
- Intro to Maple for Physics Students: This page contains a well organized list of Maple labs for doing some basic mathematics problems of interest to physicists. Since this course is precisely a discussion of the mathematical methods of interest to physicists, this website is a great place to start.
- Dynamics Lab: Want to see some pretty slick phsyics animations made with Maple (by a High School Senior), check these dynamics simulations of coupled pendulums and orbits.