Some useful tools and resources for you to explore at your free time.
Stellarium:
Even with our bright city lights, we can still see most of the brightest stars in the night sky and recognize the main constellations. Here is Stellarium, a free open-source planetarium that you can use on your own computer, to navigate through the night sky. We will also use this in some of our labs, so please make sure you have it installed.
There are also similar apps that have free versions on different app stores, which can let you do the same thing on your phone wherever you are.
Interactive Simulations:
The University of Colorado at Boulder built an extensive list of simulations in the website below. You should find some of the simulations looking very familiar 🙂
https://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/filter?type=html,prototype
More specifically, the few simulations that I used as demos in class include:
Forces, motions and Newton’s Laws
UNL-NAAP Online Tools:
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has made possible a series flash-based tools, demonstrations and exercises, which you can find through this link:
https://astro.unl.edu/nativeapps/
It includes a lot of the demos and exercises that will actually be used in class, so feel free to explore!
PS: These simulators were built based on Flash. If your web browser doesn’t support Flash anymore, you can find all the same simulators here on GitHub:
https://ccnmtl.github.io/astro-simulations/
CLEA:
The CLEA project is a very powerful virtual educational observatory developed by the University of Gettysburg for some very cool labs and observations. If we do the labs in person, it is already installed on the computers. If we do the labs at home, you will need to install it on your own computers. You can download the software from the link below
http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~marschal/clea/Vireo.html
However, the software currently only supports Windows system. But if you are using any Linux OS or MacOS that is Mojave or below, you can install the software still through Wine (sadly this method doesn’t work for MacOS Catalina at the moment), through the detailed manual of installation below. Please contact Yuzhe Song or David Atlee if you encounter any problems with the installation.
SDSS-Sky Server Projects:
The Sloan Digital Sky Server have provided a very extensive lists of basic and advance exercises using REAL observational data. Depending on the accessibility of machines to the students, we may end up using some of these exercises as a substitute for some of the labs. But don’t hesitate to browse through and try out the exercises if you’re interested. This is very close to how astronomers actually do their research!
http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr16/en/proj/projhome.aspx
Talks:
Local institutes that host astronomy and astrophysics research have regular talks on lates discoveries in research. Given the situation of the fall semester that almost everything will almost be online, it is a great opportunity to join in remotely if you’re interested. The lists and the links of talks of the different institutes are here:
American Museum of Natural History
Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute
Columbia University
NYU
