Other Resources

This page contains links to the various web sites and other resources that we found useful in creating Voyager and SkyGazer. It also lists a few other sites of general interest to amateur astronomers. A few sites are listed more than once under different categories: for example, we found the HubbleSite to be an excellent resource for both solar system images and deep space images.

There are, of course, two other internet tools of great use to astronomers: Google and Wikipedia. However, as these are only content indexers or compilations of other material, we thought it might be better to bring you directly to the sources that we've found the most useful.

Educational Sites

These sites are sources of general information on astronomical topics like the solar system, the stars and constellations, and the objects that can be seen with amateur telescopes. A few contain on-line astronomy course notes, and all are fairly non-technical.

• The Nine Planets - Bill Arnett's Multimedia Tour of the Solar System. A classic of the web.

• Views of the Solar System - by Calvin J. Hamilton. Excellent descriptive text on the planets, moons, and small bodies of our solar system.

• Solar System Exploration - NASA/JPL's official educational site on the solar system and planetary exploration. Contains some nice, concise descriptions of the planets and their satellites.

• Cometography - Gary Kronk's comprehensive site is the Internet's authority on comets and meteors. Mr. Konk provided the comet database for earlier versions of Voyager.

• NASA Eclipse Web Site - Fred Espenak's complete guide to solar and lunar eclipses, transits, and moon phases.

• Calendar Converter - allows you to interconvert dates in a variety of calendars, and provides concise explanations of many of the world's different calendar systems. The JavaScript code from this site was the basis for many of Voyager 4.5's new calendar systems.

• STARS - Jim Kaler, Prof. Emeritus of Astronomy, University of Illinois, has written thoroughly-well-researched descriptions of over 500 of the brightest and best-known stars in the sky.

• Notable Nearby Stars - produced by SolStation, contains a number of current and well-researched articles on nearby stars, as well as a few miscellaneous other objects.

• The Messier Catalog - at SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space). An interactive, searchable set of pictures, descriptions, and data for the most famous 110 star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies in the sky. The first and most famous Messier catalog on the Web.

• The Interactive NGC Catalog Online - by Hartmut Frommert and Christine Kronberg, hosted by SEDS. Describes the NGC-IC deep sky objects - a few thousand more - in a similar style as to the SEDS Messier catalog.

• Constellations: Stories and a Deepsky Atlas - the Hawaiian Astronomical Society's constellation-by-constellation guide to the night sky. One of the first such sites on the internet, and still one of the best.

• Nature of the Universe - by the Hong Kong University Department of Physics. Notes for a two-semester introduction to astronomy course. Sometimes the English is bit off, but the graphics are good and the course is surprisingly comprehensive.

• Astrophysics for Senior Physics - Australia Telescope Outreach and Education. A very thorough on-line course on stellar evolution and astrophysical topics outside the solar system. A bit more technical than the HKU course above.