Scout staff and readers ponder the same questions about the cosmos that many great minds have sought to answer long before us. This resource is a collection of items that look into the lives and minds of the great thinkers in the field. They range from Galileo and Copernicus to Carl Sagan. With the release of the television series "Cosmos," we feel that we are unofficially in the year of Carl...

The HubbleSite is produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute's Office of Public Outreach. The Gallery page of the site lets visitors explore the incredible pictures taken by the Hubble telescope in several ways. The showcase link provides an interactive environment to view photographs taken of the solar system, stars, galaxies, nebulae, exotic features, and the telescope itself. The newest...

At this website, visitors can discover the Illinois State University (ISU) Planetarium, which was created to provide a popular form of enriching entertainment, facilitate university-community relation, and recruit potential students. For astronomers, the website features a useful celestial events calendar updated at the end of each month. Educators can learn about the many programs ISU Planetarium...

Astronomers have observed a visible light emitted at the same time as a gamma-ray burst for the first time on January 27, 1999. Six images of this gamma-ray burst are provided at the University of Michigan site.

This high-quality collection is provided courtesy of NASA's Johnson Space Center, and it contains over 9,000 images. Visitors can get started by looking over the FAQ area, which provides answers to questions like "Where can I et prints and high-resolution scans of this imagery?" and "What is a 'fuzzy match?'" After this, visitors can perform a full-text search across all of the items, or use the...

Located on the summit of Mount Hamilton in the Diablo Mountain Range, the Lick Observatory is a tremendous astronomical facility. This digital collection from the University of California-Santa Cruz offers up some of the records culled from this facility's history. Here visitors can find historical photographs that document life at the Observatory, along with images of telescopes, lenses, and some...

These latest findings from Hubble will appeal to anyone with even a passing interest in astronomy. The first focuses on collisions between galaxies within Stephan's Quintet that have given rise to star clusters and dwarf galaxies. This release includes an introduction, background information, stunning photos, animations, videos, related links, and more.

Part of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, the Wide-Field Astronomy Unit maintains the SuperCosmos Sky Surveys Web site. The SuperCosmos is an advanced photographic plate-digitizing machine that produces data derived from the scans of photographic Schmidt survey plates. Visitors can "extract images (pixel data) up to 15 arcmin across and/or object catalogues covering up to...

The Henrietta Leavitt Flat Screen Space Theater is named for an American astronomer working at the Harvard Observatory in the beginning of this century. The site is authored by Carolyn Collins Petersen, an accomplished astronomy writer and part-time Hubble researcher. Carolyn takes viewers to "The Planetarium Show That Never Ends," where various heavenly bodies are displayed and described in...

Professor Douglas P. Hamilton and his students at the University of Maryland created this website to provide individuals with astronomy tools and tutorials. At the Astronomy Classroom, students can create scaled models, find out how long it takes to get to interesting places in the Universe, and explore the history of the cosmos. The website offers solar system calculators, animations of solar...