Frequently Asked Questions for Astronomy 2201

These questions will be updated through the semester.

Questions about observing the night sky
Questions about the development of astronomy through the ages
Questions about the electromagnetic spectrum, light waves, spectra etc.
Questions about telescopes
Some examples of how objects appear to be quite different to multiwavelength observations
Questions about nuclear burning and the evolution of stars, especially the Sun
Images of the Orion region
Questions about binary stars
Questions about supernovae and stellar death
Questions about pulsars
Questions about black holes
UTenn-Knoxville orbit animation
Terry's Herter's binary star orbits animation

What are the types of galaxies and what does that mean?
What are the characteristics of the different types of galaxies?
What is the Milky Way?
How do the stars in the disk of a galaxy move?
How do the stars in the bulge or halo of a galaxy move?
How do galaxies form and evolve?
What is galactic rotation?
What are rotation curves?
How do we determine the inclination of a galaxy?
See an example of obtaining a rotation curve with the Palomar 5m telescope and its double spectrograph.

Check out Erin's galaxy page

What is Hubble's Law?
What are the basic observational clues that support the Hot Big Bang model?
What was the Shapley - Curtis Debate in 1920?
What is Olber's Paradox?
What is Hubble's Law?
What is the relativistic doppler shift?
What is meant by the expansion of the universe?
What is a quasar gravitational lens?
What are the possibilities for future evolution of the universe?
What is the geometry of the universe like?
What is the Primordial Background Radiation?
What is the Cosmic Background Explorer COBE?
What is the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe WMAP?
What are the values of the cosmological parameters as determined in 2003 by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe WMAP?
What is the historical timeline of the universe?
What happened at the recombination era?
How long ago did the Big Bang take place? What is the current age of the universe?
What is Primordial Nucleosynthesis?
What is the cosmological constant?
What are the four fundamental forces?
What is inflation?
The NASA Intro to Cosmology page
Wayne Hu's CBM page

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 celestial events are taking place in the sky this week from Sky and Telescope magazine.
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, with longitudes and latitudes. Note: to find the town of Borgo a Mozzano in the province of Lucca Italy, I needed to search for "Borgo a Mozzano" as an "inhabited place" in Italy.
Astronomical applications site of 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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Last updated Thu Nov 10 2011 by martha