Amateur Astronomy: Online Resources

A guide for MSU and community users on both MSU Libraries and freely available resources for hobby and amateur astronomers.

Online Resources

Stellarium
Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.
Naval Oceonography Portal - The Sky This Week
The U.S. Naval Observatory provides a weekly newsletter of observable events in the night sky for the upcoming week.
NOAA Aurora 30 minute forecast
NOAA's short-term forecast of the location and intensity of the aurora. Two maps provide forecasts for both the North and South poles.

Hubble Space Telescope Images
ESA/Hubble images, videos and web texts are available for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
NASA Image and Video Library
The majority of NASA's image library is available to use without copyright restrictions, with the exception of images with the NASA logo.

Images from the Hubble Space Telescope image library