I have been working on a site for a few months now which i believe may be of help to people who classify themselves as beginners in astronomy.
This site gets updated each and every day and is divided into separate sections based on what your interests are.
Sydney Star Gazers itself includes a Clear Sky chart I update frequently during the day to indicate what the observing conditions will be like in Sydney NSW. I also am producing cloud maps using a weather prediction model to show what the cloud is doing between sunset and midnight which is when I believe most of us would be star gazing. The cloud map shows the majority of the east coast of australia so it may be of help to others living outside Sydney as well.
The Clear Sky Chart for Sydney shows an hourly forecast of cloud cover, seeing, transparency and shows if the Moon is in our night sky and will it's illumination effect observing. But I only look at the hours after sunset and before sunrise.
What is perhaps more helpful to beginners is that I am posting articles such as how to clean your lens, how to collimate the telescope, etc. I am trying to put in some interesting facts as well about black holes, nebulae, star clusters and the such in hopefully a non-boring way. This will hopefully help people understand the nature of our Universe.
And if beginners do not know what objects to look at during a night of observing, I am posting daily targets in a section called Sydney Universe Watch to look at which are the best targets to see for the month we are currently in. So if you do not have a list of objects to look at , universe Watch will explain what you can loom at and where you can find it. Generally I look at objects visible at 9pm Sydney time but that is flexible.
If people want to learn about comets I have recently added a section called Sydney Comet Watch. That is still in it's early stages.
And one of my interests at the moment are near earth asteroids which i look at in a section called Sydney Asteroid Watch. Here I plot the paths of the Earth of the asteroid over a couple of days and show where their paths cross and exactly how close this near earth object was. I also give an asteroids eye view of the Earth from it's nearest point of approach to our planet and look at asteroids that have entered out atmosphere and what happened to them.
i am hoping that this site is of help to people who want to learn more about astronomy.
If anyone wants to check the site it can be found at
http://sydneystargazers.wordpress.com/
Links to my blogs for Universe Watch, Comet Watch and Asteroid Watch are found on the menu to the right of the page.
Hopefully my site will be of help to beginners out there.
