Welcome to the homepage for Physics 120: Astronomy. You can view the syllabus by clicking here.

WWW Astronomical Links

Galileo's telescopes Photos of Galileo's telescopes taken by Dr. Hickey in Florence, Italy in 2004>

Stonehenge This page contains several photos of the Stonehenge monument taken by Dr. Hickey in 1999.

Useful tools

RA and DEC for Messier objects. You will find the right ascension and declination for all Messier objects at this site.

Fits viewer.You can download a Fits viewer here so that you can view your image. Be sure to unzip all of the files and store them in a folder on your hard drive.

Historical and biographical information about some scientists

• Tycho Brahe. (Learn about Tycho's metal nose).
• More about Tycho.
• Johanne s Kepler. (Kepler's theories of the universe.)
• Galileo Galilei. (An abundance of historical and scientific info.)
• Isaac Newton

Retrograde motion

• A very nice site with animations showing the explanation of retrograde motion.

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Special Relativity

• Animation showing length contraction.
• Animation showing time dilation and clocks.
• General Relativity.

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Some sites with the universe in 3-D

• Ambroziak Third Dimension Technologies, Inc.
• LPI's 3-D Tour of the Solar System.
• Meade Instruments
• Oceanside Photo and Telescope
• Rainbow Symphony.

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Information about planets and earth's moon

• Discovery of neutrino mass
• Galileo spacecraft findings(latest information from the Galileo spacecraft's mission to Jupiter and its moons.)
• Earth and Moon Viewer(Allows you to view the Moon from Earth or Sun, features on the Moon, phases, etc.)
• Mars, Live from(about 1996-97 NASA missions to Mars)
• Mars, SNC Meteorites from(Ron Baalke JPL page)
• Moon (Clementine Image Browser)
• NASA Planetary Photojournal
• Neutrinos - Information about the solar neutrino problem
• Nine Planets - excellent and readable information on all solar system objects
• Planets, Welcome to the (JPL)
• Planets, Searching for Extrasolar (from San Francisco State University, detailed treatment)
• Solar System Liveallows you to, among other things, watch animations of planetary motions
• Sun (Virtual Trip)
• Venus (Magellan mission)

Comets and Asteroids

• Comet Hyakutake (JPL)
• Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9)
• Meteorites and Impact Craters (Canadian resource)
• Meteorites (SNC from Mars)(Ron Baalke JPL page)

The night sky

• Abram's Planetarium Sky Diary (what is happening day by day each month)
• Constellations(superb site by Chris Dolan with diagrams and explanation of constellations and brighter stars)
• Hubble Space Telescope recent images
• Magnitude, Estimating Limiting
• Messier Object catalog with information and images
• NSSDC (U.S. National Space Science Centre Data Centre) Photo Gallery
• Picture of the Day (NASA project gives the astronomical picture of the day and a brief hypertext account written by a professional astronomer)
• Web Nebula, The (Bill Arnett's excellent selection of deep sky objects)

Black holes, dark matter and other exotic stuff

• Cosmology and the Origin of Life (Internet introductory course)

Questions? Please feel free to send e-mail to Dr. Hickey