Astronomy

Welcome to the Department of Astronomy!

Astronomy is the science of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the Earth's atmosphere, such as stars, planets, comets, aurorae, galaxies, and the cosmic background radiation. It is concerned with the formation and development of the universe, the evolution and physical and chemical properties of celestial objects and the calculation of their motions.

Welcome

Astronomy is a new Department at Wikiversity, and it's growth depends on participation from everyone who seeks to learn here. The basic philosophy is to learn by doing. This is reflected in the content of lessons and activities. But this means more than just reading a lesson and following the directions. We also hope that you will participate in the process of creating lessons.

To get started try the lesson on Stellar Evolution or the activity on Observational astronomy.

For a glimpse of some of the topics that we hope to cover in the future see the Topic:Astronomy/Courses.

If you have any questions about astronomy or requests for topics that you would like to learn, post them to the astronomy help desk.

Things to do

• Cleanup all astronomy related pages and organize
• Link to information about supernova/asteroid online searches
  • Portal:Asteroid Surveys
• Link to data sources
• Link to amateur astronomers societies (and get amateur astronomers to this page)
• Load in the astrophysics source code library

Active participants

The histories of Wikiversity pages indicate who the active participants are. If you are an active participant in this school, you can list your name here (this can help small schools grow and the participants communicate better; for large schools it is not needed).

• User:Roadrunner
• User:Suto
• User:Mu301

Are you interested in Astronomy? Would you like to create instruction material and help out with people studying this topic? Sign up to be a participant by adding your username to this list!

School news

• August 17, 2006 - School founded!

Lessons

Get to work writing lessons! Simply make a link to the name of the lesson (lessons are independent pages) and start writing!

Research projects

Learning project: Astronomy Project - students access public astronomy databases and explore outer space.

Astrophysics Source Code Library = ASCL

BoomCode - GPL Type II supernova collapse code

Resources

Know any good resources for scholars of this topic? Add them here!

Wikiresources

• Topic:Astronomy/Wikiresources

External Resources

• [1] - Journal article database
• [2] - Preprints database
• [3] - Astrophysics source code library
• Dick McCray's Astronomy Hypertext
• [4] - Introduction to General Astronomy, Webcast from Berkeley

Careers

• [5] - Astrophysics job rumor mill
• [6] - AAS Job Register
• [7] - AAS Non-Academic Astronomy Network