Carey's favorite astronomy-related sites

Mostly-for-fun sites:

Looking for pretty pictures? (Or videos or sound clips?) There are plenty out there. Too many to list here, in fact. So check out one (or more) of these "lists of lists" of online space pictures collections. NASA maintains a list at SSDC (and other places); AstroWeb also has a good list.

For a tour of our solar system, try The Nine Planets by Bill Arnett, or NASA's own Welcome to the Planets.

The Cassini spacecraft has arrived at Saturn, and data on the planet, its rings, and its bizarre moons is starting to pour in.

Missed out on Comet Hyakutake? Don't let it happen again: check JPL's Comet observation page regularly. (This site can get a bit technical.) And for eclipse news, go to Espenak's Eclipse Page.

Professional astronomy sites:

• AstroWeb is a substantial collection of links to the rapidly expanding universe of online astronomical/astrophysical resources, with search capability. (But will it keep expanding forever, or will it eventually collapse back into the funding vacuum at its core?)
• The NASA Astrophysicsal Data System allows you to search the abstracts of most major astronomical publications, among other things.
• The yellow pages, maintained by The Astrophysical Journal, is a list of articles submitted to several astronomical journals.
• The International Jupiter Watch "is devoted to coordinating and encouraging observations of Jupiter, its satellites, and magnetosphere, from the Earth and from space, with an emphasis on time-variable phenomena." It is divided into six "disciplines," of which the most interesting to me is the Io plasma torus discipline. [As of this writing, these sites are rather stale.]
• The Division for Planetary Sciences of the The American Astronomical Society is the main professional organization for planetary astronomers; it publishes Icarus and sponsors a huge annual meeting.
• The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph is an instrument on the Hubble Space telescope that I have used to look at Io.
• The rings node of the The Planetary Data System has three tools to aid in observing the planets: a planet viewer, a moon tracker, and an ephemeris generator.
• The JPL Solar System Dynamics site also has a nifty ephemeris generator.