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Sites of the Week for April 1997

Week of April 7, 1997

The NGC/IC Project: The NGC/IC project is an effort to correctly identify all the objects in the New General Catalogue (NGC) and Index Catalogues (IC), two collections of all the nebulae and star clusets known to exist at the turn of the century. This group of volunteer astronomers in North America and Australia are starting with the original observer notes of these objects to confirm their positions and appearance in the original catalogue. This site is a wealth of information about their project and results!
http://www.ngcic.com/

Solar System Live: You can easity turn to just about any planetarium program to see where the planets are in the night sky, but "Solar System Live" is a Web site that gives you the opportunity to look down on the solar system and see the positions of the planets in their orbits around the Sun. You can see the planets in their positions as of the present time, or check out the positions at other times in the past and future (for example, the so-called "alignment" of the planets on May 5, 2000; see how far off some of the outer planets are!).
http://www.fourmilab.ch/solar/solar.html

Space Tourism Initiative Information: Space tourism has become a hot topic recently with government and private efforts to develop low-cost launch systems that could bring the price of a trip into space down to reasonable levels. This site, a joint project of the Space Policy Institute and the International Institute of Tourism Studies at the George Washington University, not only provides more information about space tourism but also has a survey that potential space tourists can fill out to judge their level of interest in the concept.
http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~spctour/

Artemis Data Book: The Artemis Project is an effort to operate the first private manned mission to the moon. While their efforts to date have largely been limited to paper/electronic studies, much of their work is online and freely available in the Artemis Data Book. In this well-organized reference guide they describe the planned "reference" mission with technical details, other mission possibilities, and their plans to turn the mission concept into reality.
http://www.asi.org/adb/index.html

Speth's Space Pages - Autograph Exhibition: This site features a wide ranging exhibition of autographs by astronauts collected by Roland Speth. The site includes autographs from astronauts in the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz programs, broken down by mission. He also has concise notes about each set of autographs. This site is up for only a limited time, due to space limitations (no put intended!), so make sure to pay a visit before the exhibition comes down some time in May!
http://www.yi.com/home/SpethRoland/Autographs/exhibit.htm

Woomera: In the 1950s and 1960s one of the major sites in the world for testing rockets was located at Woomera, in the Australian outback. This site was the home to tests of such rockets as the Skylark, Black Knight, and Black Arrow, and was home to a NASA site for communicating with deep-space spacecraft. The history of the Woomera is chronicled at this site, which includes information and images of some of the rockets launched from there, with more information added on a regular basis.
http://www.powerup.com.au/~woomera/

Astronomical image Library: There are many thousands of images of astronomical objects, from those within our solar system to the farthest depths of the universe, available on the Web. Finding one of a particular object you're interested in, though, can be another matter. The Astronomical Image Library is a sort of search engine that allows users to search for locations of astronomical images located throughout the Web, like an AltaVista or Infoseek solely for astronomy images. A search for Pluto, for example, turned up nearly two dozen images. This is an excellent resource when you need to find an image of a particular object and don't want to deal with the full-featured search engines.
http://www.syz.com/images/

NASA Space Art Home Page: Tucked away in a corner of the sprawling Johnson Space Center Web site is this gem: a collection of NASA space art images created over the years. The site includes artwork from the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Shuttle programs as well as artwork of advanced exploration concepts. This site is part of NASA's Space Educators' Hadnbook, a useful resource in and of itself.
http://tommy.jsc.nasa.gov/~woodfill/SPACEED/SEHHTML/spaceart.html

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