Links from my "astronomy data talk"

The full-length talk itself (pdf) and screencapture movie.

Citizen Science opportunities

Originally grabbed from here, which has a much better (if possibly dated) list, with a description for each project.

These programs all involve the use of real data on the forefront of astronomical research, but are "packaged" so as to make accessing the real data far more easy (e.g., entirely web browser-based) than it might be otherwise. These projects are a great way to start to get into real data. Many offer "hooks" to get into the research questions at a deeper level when you are ready. Many have lesson plans ready-to-go -- by which I mean, lessons you can do yourself, or if you are an educator, you can use in a classroom or after school setting.

• Zooniverse has a TON -- go to the list of all Zooniverse projects, and scroll through the list to find the astronomy ones.
• SETI at home
• International Observer the Moon Night
• Globe at Night. NB: data will also be used for evaluating effects on wildlife; activities to come.
• Great World-Wide Star Count
• Solar Stormwatch
• Stardust at Home
• Citizen Sky
• Cosmo Quest
• Some citizen science programs are available at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute - see links on that page.

Things that need more of a time commitment, e.g., your own observatory (not a 3-inch Walmart telescope, but not a 3.5 meter either):

• Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers
• American Association of Variable Star Observers
• Global Telescope Network (GTN) - following up objects (initially detected at Gamma Ray and X-ray bands) from the ground.
• Planetary Virtual Observatory and Laboratory
• BAA Jupiter Section
• Radio Jove

Astronomical imaging

• "True color" from Emily Lakdawalla
• More on FITS format
• Bit depth and compression, in the context of web development
• wikipedia page on lossy compression
• FITS liberator for Photoshop
• Color in Hubble Images
• The frightful fallacy of false color
• How to make your own color HST images
• Example of an image artifact being misinterpreted
• example of something that looks like an artifact, but is real (with bonus information on multi-color images)
• even more information in this same vein -- "Why NASA's new photos of the moon look super fake (even though they're not)", July 13, 2016 Washington Post

Major US Astronomy Archives

• IRSA, the Infrared Science Archive (this is the one at Caltech)
• NED, the NASA Extragalactic Database, also at Caltech
• The NASA Exoplanet Archive (also at Caltech)
• MAST, the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (at STScI in Baltimore)
• HEASARC, the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (at Goddard in Greenbelt, MD)
• ADS, the Astrophysics Data System (at Harvard)

IRSA tools I mentioned

• Finder Chart - this is the one that I showed, with data from the optical through the IR.
• Just the WISE data
• IRSA YouTube Feed with lots of tutorial videos on IRSA tools
• Video on "Dustier, messier" Messier marathon (do a Messier Marathon in infrared!)

Planetary data

• Emily Lakdawalla's blog
• "Amateur" space images
• Tutorials on making your own

Finally...