Material to Help You Out

• A few necessary assumptions
  
• The scientific method
  
• The principle of doubt
  

GENERAL

• What's up in the sky? Follow the observing link at Sky & Telescope
• Compuerized version of Powers of Ten
• Galileo's leaning tower of Pisa experiment - on the moon: Apollo 15
• Computer Programs
  • Open source planetarium program: Stellarium
  • N-body code from Sverre Aarseth, pioneer of N-body computation.
  • Astronomical Programs specifically created for this course by Prof. Hamilton. Build your own solar systems, learn about astronomical distances and giant impacts, practice scientific notation and working with equations, and more!
  • Watch the planets move around the Sun on their actual orbits! Follow this link to the Inner Solar System and Outer Solar System animations.
  • Check out the orbits of all 67 moons orbiting the planets in our Solar System!
  • JavaLab for the curious. Collide or cannibalize your own galaxies, explore the expansion history of the cosmos, and more!
• Supplementary Information for UMD Introductory Astronomy. This site includes useful practice multiple choice questions which the computer will grade for you.
• Astronomy Picture of the Day This site is updated daily and has a nice archive of pretty astronomy images.
• Map of the Universe on a logarithmic scale to show it "all."
• Artificial Satellites
  • Predictions for artificial satellites, including
  • Satellite forecasts specific to College Park.

• Human history timeline.
• Age dating from layers in the Earth.
• Structure of the Earth including continental drift animation.

• Current Mars Rover missions: Spirit & Opportunity.
• Welcome to the Planets Information about planets and spaceprobes from JPL.
• A Tour of the Solar System This page contains information about the planets, satellites, asteroids, comets, and Solar System related topics.
• Deep Impact: Maryland Astronomy's NASA mission to crash into a comet.
• Comet Information This page contains information about recently discovered comets.
• Comet Crash pictures and movies.
• Spacewatch This page contains information about this program which searches for near Earth objects.
• Extra Solar Planets Astronomers have discovered planets around other stars. The list lengthens all the time!

• Light and the Electromagnetic Spectrum Good information about light.
• The Stellar Spectral Sequence. The colors and spectra of stars.
• Structure and Evolution of Stars What happens when a star runs out of fuel?
• Novae and Supernovae The most violent events in the Universe!
• Binary Stars This page contains general information on binary stars.
• Pulsars Hear them tick!
• Black Hole Candidates This page contains information on Cygnus X-1, LMC X-3, and other black hole candidates.
• Videos of compact objects, including the expected appearance of things in the vicinity of black holes.
• Ned Wright explains gravitational lensing.
• Andrew Hamilton discusses wormholes and related atrocities of geometry.
• Werner Benger's ray tracing simulations (e.g., close to black holes).

• Galaxy appearance and classification.
• Movie of stars orbiting the two million solar mass black hole at the center of the Milky Way (credit: Reinhard Genzel et al., Max-Planck-Institut fur Extraterrestrische Physik)
• Merging Galaxies - Josh Barnes's pedagogical sequence: initial conditions | merger | snapshot of merger in progress.
• The Really Cool Merger Simulation which appeared in the IMAX film Cosmic Voyage (courtesy of Chris Mihos). Warning: may require excessive download time
• Relativity Everything that you want to know about General Relativity, curved spacetime, and gravitational radiation!
• Cosmology How did the Universe begin? How will it end?
• Large Scale Structure Clusters & Superclusters of Galaxies. What do they look like?
• Dark Matter: What is dark matter? What is it made of?
• Some alternatives to dark matter.