There is stacks of great astronomical information on the net. As we are concentrating mainly on Australian sites, we have only listed a few international sites that you might not have come across in your travels.
Aussie copy of Nine Planets astronomy site The Nine Planets is a collection of information about our Solar System intended for a general audience with little technical background. No special expertise or knowledge is needed; all technical and astronomical terms and proper names are defined in the glossary. The bulk of this material should be familiar to planetary scientists and astronomers but they may find a few interesting tidbits, too.
Sidewalk Astronomers
Welcome to sidewalk astronomy! Our emphasis is somewhat different than the way most clubs approach astronomy. We are very informal. Our meetings are held on the sidewalks of San Francisco. As Barry Hirrell, our most active member, likes to say, "We put our telescopes in places that you'd most likely kick them over in hopes that we can stop
you and show you something you otherwise wouldn't have seen."
Digitized Sky Survey (Have your target name/coords ready) To get an image from the Digitized Sky Survey, you will need the right ascension and declination of the area you're interested in. However, if all you know is the name of an object and don't have its coordinates handy, there is help off this page to get the coordinates for you.
CLEA lab exercises Project CLEA -- Contemporary Laboratory Experiences in Astronomy -- develops laboratory exercises that illustrate modern astronomical techniques using digital data and color images. They are suitable for high- school and college classes at all levels, but come with defaults set for use in introductory astronomy classes for non-science majors. Each CLEA laboratory exercise includes a dedicated computer program, a student manual, and a
technical guide for the instructor. The technical guides describe file formats, user-settable options, and algorithms used in the programs. The most advanced CLEA labs run under Windows on PC's, or on color-capable Macintosh computers.
AstroWeb
Astronomy/Astrophysics on the Internet - a collection of pointers to astronomy-related information available on the Internet. The database is maintained by the AstroWeb Consortium.
Jeff Whisenant's M-27 Awards and Bad Astronomy Page
Gleanings of Astronomical Stupidity, Ignorance, Faux Pas, Bad Astronomy, and General BS Culled from the Tabloids, Government, Media, and the General Public M-27 is Messier Object number 27, a Planetary Nebula found in Vulpecula and commonly referred to as the Dumbbell Nebula. We present these awards to all deserving individuals and organizations when they act like dumbbells when it comes to astronomy, science, and the related politics. If you know of any acts of astronomical idiocy, please send your submissions to the link below and they will be included on this page. Remember: only you can stamp out astronomical illiteracy.
The Man in the Moon
and other weird things
Inspired by a quote from Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" about patterns that the eye sees on the surface of the moon, the author has produced a web page with some shapes that he can see. He also invites drawings from anyone else. He supplies a blank moon for you to work upon. There are some interesting diagrams here.
Powers of Ten - interactive java tutorials
View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to
move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.
