Books — For a detailed look at the geology of the giant planets’ moons and Pluto’s Charon, see David A. Rothery’s Satellites of the Outer Planets (Oxford University Press, 1999). Pluto and Charon: Ice Worlds on the Ragged Edge of the Solar System (Wiley-Interscience, 1997), by S. Alan Stern and Jacqueline Mitton, is a great book for a general audience. To explore Mars and its satellites Phobos and Deimos, try Joseph M. Boyce’s The Smithsonian Book of Mars (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002).
Web — Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution of Washington has an up-to-date site on the giant planets’ moons at www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~sheppard/satellites. Background information and jovian moon images are at galileo.jpl.nasa.gov. For the Cassini mission to Saturn, check out JPL’s saturn.jpl.nasa.gov the ESA’s, www.esa.int/specials/cassini-huygensand the Cassini imaging team’s ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu. To learn about martian moons, visit nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/thumbnail_ pages/mars_sat_thumbnails.html. For more information on Pluto, check out Lowell Observatory astronomer Marc Buie’s site at www.lowell.edu/users/buie/pluto/pluto.html and University of Colorado professor Fran Bagenal’s at dosxx.colorado.edu/plutohome.html.
Books— Paleontologist David M. Raup, who first suggested mass extinctions on Earth occur periodically, discusses the ideas behind a possible cosmic cause in The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999). In this revised and updated version of his original 1986 book, Raup explores the Nemesis theory as well as the controversies surrounding it. Physicist Richard Muller first proposed the Sun has a companion that periodically passes through the Oort Cloud, unleashing a storm of comets that cause mass extinctions on Earth. He discusses the genesis of the idea and his work to create a coherent theory based on his initial insight in Nemesis: The Death Star (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988).
Book— A text aimed at physics and astronomy undergraduate students, Barbara Ryden’s Introduction to Cosmology (Addison Wesley, 2003).
Article — To learn more about the inflation theory, read “Inflation comes of age” by Steve Nadis, published in Astronomy magazine’s 2004 special issue, Origin & Fate of the Universe.
Web — For more information on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), including its released data sets, see www.sdss.org. Visit map.gsfc.nasa.govfor information on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), and what it discovered.
Books— Practical Astrophotography, by Jeffrey R. Charles, edited by Patrick Moore (Springer-Verlag London, 2000) has everything you want to know about astrophotography, from traveling with your equipment to photographing particular astronomical events. For instructions on solar observing and photographing, plus an introduction to the science of the Sun, check out Total Eclipses: Science, Observations, Myths and Legends by Pierre Guillermier and Serge Koutchmy (Praxis Publishing Ltd., 1999).
Web — For more information about the March 2006 solar eclipse visit NASA’s sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEmono/TSE2006/TSE2006.html.
