Following are some websites of general use in all astronomy courses.  Weekly assignments will contain other websites of specific importance to that week's work.   If you find one of the following links to be inactive, dead, or otherwise uncooperative, please notify me (and thanks for your help).  Likewise, if you find another website in your surfing that you think would be of general interest, please let me hear from you.

AIDS FOR SKY VIEWING
http://www.fourmilab.to/yoursky/
For web software to get sky map for viewing – free. Use Vancouver or Seattle for approximate coordinates.

http://SkyandTelescope.com/observing/skychart/#
Sky & Telescope magazine's interactive sky chart - also free.  Be sure to fix your location at either Vancouver or Seattle, or enter our actual coordinates (49 deg north latitude, 122 deg west longitude).  Once you get the sky map, highlight the day, or month, or hour, or whatever on the left side of the screen, then click + or - to change that parameter, and watch the sky pattern changes. 

http://www.neave.com/lab/space/planetarium.html
PLANETARIUM, Naeve.com, this highly interactive site allows you to use your mouse to look around the sky (click to start/stop moving). Pointing at stars shows their name, magnitude and constellation. You can also change the date, time and latitude for a different sky view.

http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/constellations.html
Chris Dolan’s sky-viewing site. Good all-round help for locating stars, constellations, data on various objects of interest to sky-watchers.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
For new picture, short description, and links from NASA. I start each day here. Has archives back to June 1995, good index by topic, and adequate search engine, all at bottom of page.

http://www.wwu.edu/depts/skywise/skywatch.html
WWU's astronomy page with lots and lots of links to information, including some astro-applets.

http://planetarium.wwu.edu
Brad Snowder's WWU planetarium webpage.

http://www.whatcomastronomy.org/
Web page for WACO, the Bellingham area amateur astronomy club. Lists events including star parties, and has pictures taken by club members. Best local opportunity to do viewing without your own equipment, with help from experienced people with equipment.

http://outreach.jach.hawaii.edu/birthstars/year.php
Here's a website you can use to find a star whose distance in light-years is exactly your age - meaning the light we see now left the star when you were born.  Every birthday, you get a new one!  Thanks to Doug McKeever for telling me about this site.

ASTRONOMY NEWS AND PERIODICALS
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/news_archive.htm
News stories from NASA. Has annual headlines back to 1996. Good way to keep up with news in science and astronomy of interest to NASA.

http://sci.esa.int/index.cfm
News from ESA, the European Space Agency (their equivalent to NASA in the U.S.) – an index to various web pages with research information in different areas of astronomy.

http://www.skypub.com/news/news.shtml
Recent news from publishers of Sky & Telescope.

http://www.astronomy.com/home.asp
Home page for Astronomy magazine. Get the news and recent articles from this site.

http://www.sciam.com/
Home page for Scientific American magazine, with science news.

PRESS RELEASES, IMAGES FROM OBSERVATORIES
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html#
Home page for JPL/NASA Mars rover mission - in particular, the Spirit rover that landed on Mars in January, 2004.  See images of Mars before you can read about them in the newspapers.

http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/latest.html
Latest images from the Hubble space telescope, from space science institute. See images of deep space objects in optical and infra-red portions of the spectrum.

http://fuse.pha.jhu.edu/index.shtml
Home page of the Far Ultraviolet Space Explorer, an orbiting telescope viewing in extreme ultraviolet.

http://www.lmsal.com/YPOP/homepage.html
Home page for Yohkoh orbiting UV and X-ray telescope that observes the Sun full-time. Great "public outreach" section, and generally an excellent site for solar physics. Movies of rotating Sun.  Out of operation since December 2001, but the web site (with its excellent information) still works.

http://chandra.nasa.gov/chandra.html
Site map for the Chandra X-ray telescope, NASA’s newest. An exciting website for high-energy astronomy.

http://sci.esa.int/xmm/
Home page for the European Space Agency’s newest (as of 12/99) orbiting telescope – in the X-ray part of the spectrum.

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/
Home page for SOHO solar observatory. Several instruments keep track of the Sun at all times of the day.

http://themis.asu.edu/latest.html
For you Mars lovers, here is an image a day, with explanation, of some part of the red planet from the Mars Odyssey 2001 mission.

http://www2.keck.hawaii.edu:3636/news/news.html
News from Keck2 ground-based 10-meter telescope in Hawaii (visible and near IR parts of spectrum)

http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/
Press releases from European Southern Observatory in Chile, mostly related to their Very Large Telescope development, an array of four 8 meter diameter ground-based telescopes.

http://space.mit.edu/HETE/
Home page of High Energy Transient Explorer satellite designed to pinpoint gamma ray burster coordinates.

http://www.esa.int/export/SPECIALS/Rosetta/
Start page for the European Rosetta mission.  This spacecraft will attempt to land on a comet.  It launched from Earth early March, 2004.

GOOD GENERAL WEBSITES

http://sirtf.caltech.edu/EPO/Messier/gallery.html
Multi-wavelength images of various Messier objects, as well as a few other objects.   Good brief explanations of why objects look different at different wavelengths.

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/index.html
Excellent educational website with short, sweet explanations for introductory astronomy, with good illustrations and some fun applets (numerical simulations).  Indexed well, like a book.

http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/askmag.html
Very good site for Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on all aspects of astronomy.

http://www.seds.org/
Information site hosted by U. of Arizona students, very good for solar system science.

http://www.scotese.com/earth.htm
Great site for seeing past and future movement of Earth plates. Allow time to load JAVA applets.

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/messier.html
Pictures and descriptions of Messier objects.

http://www.astro.washington.edu/balick/WFPC2/
All about the end of life of Sun-like stars, with great photos of planetary nebulae.

http://www.stsci.edu/astroweb/astronomy.html
Astroweb, a collection of pointers to just about anything in astronomy. Good start site.

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Great site for concepts in astronomy, with movies and explanations.

http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/
High energy (X-ray, Gamma-ray) astronomy website – good starting point for exotic object information.

http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/agn/
Bill Keel’s well-organized and informative gallery of active galactic nuclei images, visible and otherwise.

http://spaceweather.com/
Has up-to-date space weather forecasts for CMEs, sunspots, ....

http://www.sec.noaa.gov/ace/
http://sec.noaa.gov/Aurora/index.html#kpmaps and http://sec.noaa.gov/rt_plots/kp_3d.html
for aurorae possibility predictions. A k_p value of 7 or greater means we have a really good chance of seeing an aurora at our latitude the night of that k_p value.  Good space weather link:  http://www.sec.noaa.gov/today2.html

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm
Best website on cosmology I’ve seen. Includes FAQs, tutorial, and more.