On July 14, NASA announced the public release of a huge collection of images (1.9 million) from the Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), the most thorough census of stars ever made. Using two automated, 51-inch telescopes, one in Arizona and the other in Chile, the three-year-old survey has so far taken images of half a million galaxies and 162 million stars. By its completion, the survey's catalogs...

Born in 1857 in Nashville, Edward Emerson Bernard started his long career as an apprentice to a photographer at the age of nine. Over the following decades, he would become one of America’s most famous observational amateurs, a position that would lead him to create his noted atlases of various regions of the Milky Way. The atlases were finally published in 1927, Barnard passed away in 1923, and...

This Space Telescope Science Institute (Hubble Space Telescope) resource is a powerful educational tool that offers stunning content. The site is browser and graphic intensive. Amazing Space contains K-12 educational activities about the planets, stars, universe, and the history of telescopes; it proves to be less graphic intensive.

Ricky Leon Murphy decided to create this website when he was working towards a master’s degree in astronomy, and he still keeps it updated regularly, along with the assistance of his wife, Chanthirar. The site has been the recipient of several awards over the past few years, and visitors looking for basic and accessible information about the world of astronomy will not be disappointed. Near the...

This site, from one of NASA's premier telescopes, should offer plenty to users with even a passing interest in astronomy and space exploration. The site features a collection of amazing images from the Chandra orbiting X-ray observatory that were recently unveiled at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Highlights include a crossbow-shaped shock wave of warped gas, a jet that emanates...

Anyone who loves exploring the night sky should head over to Dark Site Finder, a website designed to help visitors find spots ideal for stargazing. Created by photographer Kevin Palmer, visitors to the site can check out the level of light pollution in any region of the United States by entering an address into the site's map. As the site notes, "For many people getting to a 100% dark sky is not...

This Space Telescope Science Institute (Hubble Space Telescope) resource is a powerful educational tool that offers stunning content. The site is browser and graphic intensive. Explorations in Education provides electronic picture books featuring captioned images from HST. The picture books are available to be read in Mac, Windows, or screenshot versions. This site features a stand-alone...

The Space Telescope Electronic Information Service has recently released breathtaking Hubble Telescope photos of galaxies that "host" quasars. The quasars seem to "live in a remarkable variety of galaxies, many of which are violently colliding....Hubble researchers are intrigued by the fact that the quasars studied do not appear to have obviously damaged the galaxies in which they live." The...

The Hubble Telescope's "deepest-ever view of the universe" is available for viewing. "Several hundred never before seen galaxies are visible in this 'deepest-ever' view of the universe, called the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Besides the classical spiral and elliptical shaped galaxies, there is a bewildering variety of other galaxy shapes and colors that are...

"The SIMBAD astronomical database provides basic data, cross-identifications, and bibliography for astronomical objects outside the solar system." Created by the Centre de Donn'es astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) in France, the website contains over three million objects, eight and a half million identifiers, one hundred thousand bibliographical references, and four million citations of objects...