Internet Resources for Telescope Viewing

Video Transcript

"The internet is a great resource for people who are interested in getting in astronomy. Billy and I would like to show you just a few sites that will be very helpful to you. One that we go to every day here at Dyer Observatory is the astronomy picture of the day. The astronomy picture of the day puts up a new image that relates to space science or to astronomy. And some of the ground breaking things that are happening in astrophysics are posted on the astronomy picture of the day. Today's astronomy picture of the day is concerning the avalanche that was on Mars earlier this year. And if you follow the text links below, it will explain everything that you could possibly want to know about that subject. So astronomy picture of the day. If you do a search on google or yahoo or one of the search engines that will come up. It's a very popular site. Another website that you'll find very interesting is a site that tells us about satellite passes. Now, I don't know if you're aware of this, but every night you can go outside when we have clear sky, and you can see several satellites go over. If the international space station is flying over, a site like heavens-above.com, that's the current address, will take you there. And you can enter your location, latitude, or, enter the city that you're closest to, and it will give you the dates and times for satellite passes that are bright enough for you to see naked eye. Billy, would you like to show us how you enter a city? OK. There will be several options that you can use to select your location on the earth. So, under configuration, I typically will select from a database. And this is a database listing of virtually all the countries in the world with all the major cities, as well as quite a few of the minor cities as well. So, once you pick the country that you're in, you enter a search string for your city. So I'll do our current city. And then it'll give you a list of all the cities that it came up with, that matched your name. And then you simply find the correct one. So, let me find ours. And when you click on that you can book mark the page that comes up after that, and that will, from that point on, be set for your current location. And that'll give you the predictions for, let's say, the international space station, when it's going to fly over your particular area, or if the Hubble space telescope will be visible. There are also just general satellites, you know. So they may be communication satellites, pieces of rocket bodies. Those are also listed, and they go down to a pretty dim magnitude, so even if the satellites are pretty faint, they'll still list them."