RASC Calgary Centre - Online Resources
Online Resources
by Jason Nishyama
Page last updated November 5, 2018
Online data resources.
Less of a project and more of an armchair astronomer, quite literally. Thanks
to the internet, data from many professional observatories is now available free of charge to
anyone with an internet connection and a web browser. This allows many observing projects to be
done from the comfort of your own home!
Our first stop is the Space Telescope Science Institute (yes, THAT space telescope) Digitized Sky
Survey (
http://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/dss_form
). This site contains images from the first and
second Palomar Observatory Sky Surveys (POSS1 and POSS2) (augmented with data from the UK Schmidt
telescope at the Anglo-Australian Observatory for POSS2). The images for these were taken through
red and blue filters for POSS1 and POSS2 as well as an IR filter for POSS2 and the UKST images. It
is also possible to look for images from the Palomar Quick-V survey as well as the surveys used to
generate the Hubble Guide Star Catalogs.
The interface for the DSS is simple. There is a field to allow a name resolution, that is the
plates need RA and Dec, if you don't know this for, say M57, you can type M57 into the resolver
and it will find the RA and Dec for you. You can then select the type of file you want, FITS or
GIF (if you don't know what a FITS file is, best to get the GIF which can be displayed by your web
browser). If you have the software to read FITS files, then the FITS files will provide you with
more information about the image such as which telescope was used, what the exposure was, filters,
etc.
The DSS is hosted on the MAST website (
http://archive.stsci.edu/index.html
). MAST used to stand
for Mulitmission Archive at STScI but is now named for a US Senator so that MAST stands for
Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. Apart from the DSS, unembargoed data from the Hubble Space
Telescope, the Kepler and other missions is available. This means a plethora of project can be
performed by the amateur astronomer from home using professional data!
As an example the Kepler data can be used to examine variable stars' light curves. Or to examine
the light curves of stars with extra-solar planets (the original intent of the Kepler
mission).
Another excellent on-line resource is the NASA Extra-galactic Database (NED)
(
http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/
). Apart from providing basic data about galaxies, it also provides
access to spectra for those galaxies as well as various tools for manipulating the data available
in the NED. If you have an interest in galaxies and don't want to spend the long hours of data
collection needed to check them out, NED is a great place to start.
If radio astronomy is more your bag, then you'll want to check out the HIPASS database
(
http://www.atnf.csiro.au/research/multibeam/release/
). This is the Parkes radio observatory HI
all sky survey providing 21cm data of what is visible from the Parkes Radio telescope in
Australia. A similar database is available for the parts of the northern hemisphere that Parkes
can't see called HIJASS provided by the Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory in the UK
(
http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/research/hijass/
). These two sites allow you to do 21cm radio astronomy
using two of the largest single dish radio telescopes in the world from home!
Of course if you're just looking for general information, the ever popular SIMBAD database is
available at
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/
. Type in the name of the object you want to know
something about and SIMBAD will provide you with the general positional information, brightness
and so forth. It also provides information that is available in the peer reviewed literature about
such things as light curves, distances and data tables through it's sister service VisieR. It is a
great place to look for information on a particular object.
Finally if reading peer reviewed articles is your thing, check out the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory/NASA Astrophysics Data System (
http://www.adsabs.harvard.edu/
). This acts as an index
of all the major (and not so major) physics and astronomy journals as well as the ArXiv archive.
You can search by author, paper title, object or abstract key words. A word of warning, some of
the journals will require a subscription to view more than the abstract. This is less of an issue
than you would think as two of the major journals, the Astronomical and the Astrophysical Journals
open up their journals to the public after a couple of years. Also as well as publishing in a
peer-reviewed journal, many authors also deposit their manuscripts with the ArXiv archive which is
free to access (though not peer reviewed, so your milage may vary). ADS also maintains an archive
of scanned articles from many journals which can also be downloaded. Many historical journals are
available here in this manner.
These are just a few of the resources available on the web to the amateur astronomer. It's now
possible to do very serious work from home and allows us all to proudly claim to be armchair
astronomers!
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