Good Links to the Universe!

For the past four weeks I've been teaching or talking about "God and the Universe" at an adult Sunday School class at First United Methodist Church, my former church home. I learned a lot and am still learning, coming from my non-scientific background. (And my husband is a PhD. chemist.) I've committed to teaching about this again in September at All Saints Episcopal Church, my church and heart home. This time I am calling the class "God, Evolution, and the Cosmos." Since I've only read half of Primack and Abrams' book The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos, I am planning to read the rest before this up-coming class. It is a very interesting book and one written in a way where non-physicists can start to understand some of the physics involved in cosmology. In fact, it's exciting! Like this:

The heat radiation from the Big Bang was discovered in 1965, but it could probably have been detected almost 20 years earlier when the technology needed for detecting it was invented during WW II. But no one looked! No details of the cosmic background radiation could be seen until 1992 and only sharp detail across the whole sky was detected in 2003.

And here are some "facts" that are mind-boggling (as connected to us on earth):
Number of superclusters within 1 billion light years = 100
Number of galaxy groups within 1 billion light years = 240,000
Number of large galaxies within 1 billion light years = 3 million
Number of dwarf galaxies within 1 billion light years= 60 million
Number of stars within 1 billion light years = 250,000 trillion

If you are interested in more info, read the book listed above and look at/investigate the links I'll list below:

Sloan Digital Survey/ Sky Server

This website presents data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project to make a map of a large part of the universe.

The Atlas of the Universe
Pictures, images, maps, useful internet links, and glossary

Univ. Of Oregon Astronomy: Galaxies and the Expanding Universe

The View from the Center of the Universe

Links to online resources showing videos of the universe.

Hubble Site

eSky: The Electronic Sky