Online Resources

Astronomy clubs and groups:

• TAC. The Astronomy Connection. A fanatically unofficial group local to the SF Bay Area.
• SJAA. The San Jose Astronomical Association. The club has meetings scheduled each month, of various types: an astronomy class, a public observing session, and other observing sessions. It publishes a monthly newsletter, the Ephemeris. It also sponsors many community-related activities.
• The Astronomical League. Great source if your area has no local clubs, and a good source for beginning observing projects, in any case.

Mailing lists I inhabit:

• Talking Telescopes.  A great all-around mailing list about equipment.  High-traffic, though.
• Discovery Telescopes.  Group for Discovery telescope owners.
• TeleVue.  For those with TeleVue eyepieces, telescopes, or other TV fare.
• Starry Nights.  A group which exchanges observing reports.
• The Shallow Sky. A mailing list for observers of objects within the solar system.

Observing Lists:

• First of all, a list of the Messier Objects themselves courtesy of the SEDS' Messier site
• Crayon and Coe's Best Objects in the New General Catalog
• Alan Dyer's 110 Finest NGC Objects
• Brown and Buckner's Messier Plus list
• The Herschel 400 with explanatory notes for the 400 as well as the full Herschel 2500
• Objects Lists from Steve Gottlieb's DeepMap 600, published by Orion
• The Saguaro Astrononmy Club's Best Deep Sky Objects Not in the NGC and Best 110 Multiple Stars
• Steve Coe's Best Colorful Stars
• The Peoria Astronomical Society's Next Messier 100
• The Albuquerque Astronomical Society's TAAS 200 with an introduction to the list
• Boyd Edwards' list (which is a superset of some other lists) with explanatory notes
• The SEDS List of Observing Collections
• The Caldwell Catalog, which are really better suited for astrophotography

Equipment Review Sites:

• Ed Ting's Scope Reviews.  An exemplary web site which reviews lots of great stuff.  Caters to more high-end equipment.
• Todd Gross's Scope Reviews.  Another good reviews web site.
• Cloudy Nights Telescope Reviews.  New on the scene, but collecting more and more stuff each month.
• Affordable Astronomy Equipment Reviews.  Another site that's collecting reviews monthly.
• Paul Harrington's Star Ware.  This is the web site to go along with the book (and the mailing list).  Worth a look!
• Excelsis.com's Astronomy Ratings.  Combo review and ratings site, I don't give the numbers much credence, but the number of capsule reviews from average people makes the site worth a look.
• Sky & Telescope's archived equipment reviews.  Some good articles, though they don't review many scopes.

Space News:

• APOD, the Astronomy Picture of the Day.  One of my very favorites, with gobs of archives.
• Space Weather, delivering news about the "Earth-Sun environment."  You get reports on meteors, solar activity, auroras, near-earth objects, and so forth.
• Universe Today.  Space news, with a focus on space programs and technology.

Amateur Astronomy Hall of Fame

• Tony Flanders' wonderful Herschel 400 Retrospective, posted to sci.astro.amateur, is a model for observing program summaries - a much-neglected species of observing report.
• Mark Wagner's series of reports on his daughter's Messier observing program.  She is Mimi, the Messier Monster.

Return to Jason's Amateur Astronomy

Updated on 06/16/2001 03:00:45 PM