Frequently Asked Questions for Astronomy 2201

These questions relate to observing the night sky

• What phenomena were visible to the ancients and what causes these phenonema?
• What are the North American timezones?
• How do we convert from GMT to local time?
• What is sidereal time?

• What is the celestial sphere?
• What are Right Ascension and Declination?
• What are altitude and azimuth?
• What causes the seasons on Earth?
• How does our view of the sky depend on our latitude?
• What causes the phases of the Moon?
• What are eclipses?
• What is the Earth's precession?
• What will the appearance of the Big Dipper change over time?

• Practice drawing the local sky perspective yourself by downloading this practice page

• How does the Sun's path vary through the year in Ithaca?
• How does the noontime altitude of the Sun vary through the year, in Ithaca and elsewhere?
• How do the times of sunrise and sunset of the Sun vary through the year, in Ithaca and elsewhere?

• What about observing here at Cornell? The Cornell Astronomical Society holds open houses at the Fuertes Observatory on North Campus on clear Friday nights from 9 until midnight. Call the Observatory at 5-3557 to find out if it's open.

• Find out what is up in the sky this week from Sky and Telescope
• Astronomy Picture of the Day. Each day a new picture is put up and explained.
• Find the current phase of the moon, or its phase at any other date.
• Find details (times, maps of visibility at different locations) about eclipses in the next 100 years.

• Getty thesaurus of geographic names.
• Interesting info from the US Naval Observatory
• The University of Texas at Austin Library has a nice collection of maps and links to other sites (which I found by doing a search at google.com).
• Need to find the map of a place according to longitude, latitude? Google "Longitude + latitude + map" and when you locate a good site, be sure to "zoom out" first; then zoom in to someplace interesting.

• Selected astronomical objects

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