University at Buffalo Libraries

Astronomy & Astrophysics: Internet Resources

• Books, Journals, Open Access, Preprints
• Career Information
• Databases
• Educational Materials
• General Portals & Directories
• History of Astronomy
• Images, Telescopes & Stars
• Our Solar System
• Professional Societies

This guide contains selected astronomy resources freely available on the Internet. For more information on Astronomy, visit the Physics Department here at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Books, Journals, Open Access, Preprints

• arXiv Preprint Server (Cornell Univ.) - physics, mathematics, non-linear science and computer science
• Astronomy Thesaurus (Australian National Univ.) - Searchable in 5 languages.
• BookFinder.com - one of the best & largest meta-search site for new & used books.
• CAS Source Index - current and discontinued scientific and technical serial titles worldwide including journals, online preprint servers, conference proceedings, patent document series, meeting publications, and monographs containing collections of papers. [Note: this online version is missing some information from the CD product available at the Capen Reference Area CD Workstation.]
• Digital Library for Physics, Astrophysics, and Instrumentation Astrophysics Data System (ADS) from NASA/Harvard Univ.
• Directory of Open Access Journals (Lund Univ.) - Over 7,700 peer reviewed, freely available journals, the most comprehensive directory on the Web. Article level search also available.
• Directory of Open Access Repositories -OpenDOAR (Univ. of Nottingham) - an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.
• Encyclopedia Astronautica (Mark Wade) - an excellent history of spaceflight and space vehicles around the world.
• Fundamental Physical Constants (NIST)
• East Asian Gateway Service Document Delivery (Univ. at Pittsburgh) - Free, fast delivery of Chinese documents/articles to any individual researchers for research and teaching purposes where the needed item is not in any U.S. library.
• Google Books - Over 15,000,000 books and magazine issues, with material added daily.
• HathiTrust - Over 8.7 million scanned items, all described by precise metadata. Full-text of copyrighted items (~73%) are generally inaccessible.
• Handbook of Space Astronomy and Astrophysics (Cambridge Univ. Press)
• Journal-Ranking.com (Andrew Lim, Hong Kong Univ. of Science & Technology) - Free iinteractive journal ranking service allowing users to choose ranking parameters. Alternative to ISI journal impact factors.
• Landolt-Bornstein Substance / Property Index - Keyword searchable as well as molecular formula, element system, CAS Registry Numbers, chemical name, and zeolite indicies. UB has most of the older print volumes on the Silverman (Capen) Reference shelves (QC61.L33 & QC61.L332).
• The Online Books Page (John Mark Ockerbloom, Univ. of Penna.) - A meta-search & directory of over 800,000 freely available online books.
• Publish or Perish (Anne-Wil Harzing) - a downloadable, free program analyzing Google Scholar citations to an author's publications. Reports statistics such as ave. cites per paper and h-index & related metrics. Disclaimer: Google Scholar citation data is very noisy & includes non-peer reviewed citing documents.  Citation variations likely inflate number of papers & citations.
• RoMEO - Over 400 publisher copyright and self-archiving policies (SHERPA)
• SciVee (Univ. of California, San Diego) - Allows scholars to post articles along with a video presentation. Sponsored by NSF & Public Library of Science.

Career Information

• American Astronomical Society Job Register
• NASA Jobs
  • Career & Research Opportunities for College Students
• Naturejobs (Nature Magazine)
• Optics.Org Employment Service (Institute of Physics)
• PhDs.org: Science, Math & Engineering Career Resources (Geoff Davis) - aims at Ph.D. candidate & job seekers.  Includes school rankings at Find the Graduate School That's Right for You.
• Space Careers (Spacelinks) - Space industry commercial job service.
• SPIE Career Center (International Society for Optical Engineering).

Databases

• Astronomical Almanac Online [Nautical Almanac Office (U.S.)/Her Majesty's Nautical Almanac Office/(U.K.)]
• Astronomical Data Archives Center (ADAC) (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)
• Astrophysics Data System (ADS) - Digital Library for Physics, Astrophysics, and Instrumentation (NASA/Harvard Univ.)
• Frequencies for Observed Interstellar Molecular Microwave Transitions (NIST)
• NASA/IPAC Extragalatic Database - Includes LEVEL5 knowledgebase.
• NIST Data Gateway - Access to all databases available from NIST's Standard Reference Data (SRD) collections.
• Parallax Project Historic Star Data - Star parallax data and calculations from 1910-1969, originally, the Publications of the Allegheny Observatory of the University of Pittsburgh in 10 volumes.
• SIMBAD Astronomical Database (Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg) - data on astronomical objects outside the solar system.
• US Virtual Astronomical Observatory - meta search of data collections, catalogs, and image archives

Education Materials & Web Courses

See also: Our Solar System

• Astronomy and Cosmology on Stamps (UB SEL) - Exhibit of postage stamps with astronomical themes
• Astronomy Center (AAS, AAPT, National Science Digital Library/NSF) - Clearinghouse of digital resources, teaching aids, news, & learning tools.
• Astronomy Education Review (Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy) - New ideas and resources for teaching and outreach in space sciences.
• Astronomy Software Servers (Astroweb) - Over 100 sites and codes listings that are used in astronomical research.
• Center for Astronomy Education (Jet Propulsion Lab) - A wide variety of resources are listed including workshops, teaching strategies, research-validated curriculum, assessment tools, college locator, an educators' discussion group, and links to many other resources.
• GradschoolShopper (AIP) - one-stop resource for researching graduate programs in physics, astronomy, and related fields.
• NASA Education Center
• National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) Learning Center- more than 6,300 different resources, of which over 1,900 are free. Searchable by grade level and type of resource (lesson plans, SciPacks, podcasts, etc.)  Includes a browsable, comprehensive, full-text collection of state learning standards.
• Physics and Astronomy Departments Around the World (Physlink)
• Planetary Science Research Discoveries (Univ. of Hawaii) - collection of online articles, resources, news, and classroom activities.
• Project CLEA: Laboratory Exercises in Astronomy (Gettysburg College)
• Science Magazine: Video Portal - A wide range of high quality videos on interesting and very current research.
• Science360 (NSF) - Gathers the latest science videos provided by scientists, universities, research centers, NSF, and others. Exceptional navigation features. Focuses on cutting-edge discoveries and big science stories of the day.
• SciTalks: Smart people on cool topics (Lee Vodra) - Excellent science videos, many by propminent researchers. Caution: Videos are self posted. Copyright & accuracy uncertain.
• Symbols.com- Over 2,500 Western signs and ideograms with a unique graphic description search, e.g. symmetric vs. non-symmetrical
• Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students (Penn State Univ.) - a particularly useful and comprehensive guide to good scientific writing.

General Portals and Directories

• About.com Astronomy Directory
• Astronomical Resources on the Internet (Univ. of Denver)
• AstroWeb Consortium (NRAO) - Data, people, publications, organizations, research
• CORE - COnnecting REpositories ( Knowledge Media institute, The Open University) - millions of scholarly articles aggregated from many Open Access repositories.
• Directory of Open Access Journals - Article Search (Lund Univ.) - Use the lower search box to access nearly 1 million OA articles in over 7,700 journals.
• Europeana - Multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitized items from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections.
• NASA Home Page - Links to the space agency and more.
  • Life Sciences Data Archive - Including mission overviews and image library
• National Science Digital Library - funded by major NSF grants.
• OAIster - collection of digital open access/open archive documents (OCLC)
• Resources in Astronomy (Special Libraries Association Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Div.)
• Science Accelerator (DOE) - a federated search engine that searches 10 key Department of Energy resources.
• Science.gov "USA.gov for Science" gateway.
• Scirus (Elsevier) - search engine for scientific information
• Virtual Astronomy, Astrophysics, and Space Reference Center - Martindale's Reference Desk
• WorldWideScience.org - Open access portal & federated search engine covering over 400 million pages from 65 countries. Papers can be translated into nine different languages.

History of Astronomy

• Biographical Index to Sky & Telescope - Covers complete run from Vol. 1, no. 1 (Nov. 1941) on.
• History of Astronomy - Also has links to science awards and prizes and pages devoted to women in science. (Univ. of Bonn, Germany)
• Sciencetimeline.net
• Wikipedia Astronomy Timelines - extensive directory of timelines on the Internet.

Images, Telescopes & Star Guides

• Anglo-Australian Observatory of Astronomical Images - Striking wide-field photographs
• Astronomy Images Directory - Pretty Pictures (NRAO) - Over 100 sites listed, from Hubble to the space shuttle to comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.
• Constellation and star guide (Univ. of Wisconsin) -when they are best seen and interactive sky charts.
• Interactive Sky Chart (Sky and Telescope magazine) -View an image of the sky from any location on earth. Free registration required.
• The Messier Catalog - Focuses on the most beautiful nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies (SEDS)
• NASA Images - Metasearch of over 21 major NASA image collections (NASA/Internet Archive)
• Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Telescope Data Center

Our Solar System

See also: Educational Materials & Web Courses

• Habitable Worlds (NASA) - explore each planets potential for supporting life with many facts and photos about each planet.
• Lunar and Planetary Institute (Universities Space Research Association)
  • Exploring the Moon . Histories and images, etc. on all the Lunar missions.
  • Lunar Atlases . Four atlases are online in digital form
  • Lunar Topographic Orthophotomap (LTO) Series . Digital images of 1:250,000 scale maps produced by the Defense Mapping Agency.
  • Planetary Science Websites
• Map-a-Planet (USGS/NASA) - create customized maps of planets and moons.
• NASA Human Spaceflight - Information about the International Space Station and a launch countdown clock plus links to the Space Shuttle page and the history of manned space flight.
• NeoDys: Near Earth Objects - Orbital data on all Near Earth Asteroids and impact risk analysis.
• Planetary, Lunar, and Stellar Visibility (Alcyone Software) - freeware program that produces color diagrams showing when astronomical objects are visible during any year from 3000 BC to AD 6000 at any location on the earth.
• Solar System Simulator (NASA) - Software that visualizes solar system objects from many perspectives based on user-specified parameters.
• View of the Solar System: Lesson Plans and Activities (Calvin J. Hamilton)
• U.S. Naval Observatory - Extensive astronomical data such as sun and moon rise and set times, moon phases, eclipses, seasons, and positions of solar system objects. Information on software, research, and publications.

Professional Societies

• AAS - American Astronomical Society
• ASP - Astronomical Society of the Pacific
• IAU - International Astronomical Union
• IPS - International Planetarium Society
• SEDS - Students for the Exploration and Development of Space
• USRA - Universities Space Research Association
• More Astronomical Societies (NRAO) - Alphabetical list