Astronomy Tools

Here are some essential web tools for astronomy.

Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

You can find almost any publication in astronomy using the powerful search engine for papers ADS, the Astrophysics Data System.

There is a lot of cool functionality here! You can search by first author, other authors, year, words in the title or abstract - but also remember to create libraries (eg this one of all my papers) to help organize things. The number one use case is finding papers - and the number two is creating BibTeX citation refs to go in your papers.

SIMBAD

The search engine for stars, SIMBAD, is your friend. Nearly all stars have many identifiers in many different catalogs - how do you know which is which? Search it in SIMBAD, by name, coordinates, or whatever, and you can bring up lots of metadata (including publications that refer to that star).

VizieR

From the same team that brought you SIMBAD comes VizieR, a tool for manipulating astronomical catalogues and databases. Want to cross-match two surveys? VizieR provides painless ways to do this!

MAST

The Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes archives all NASA space telescope data. You can search all NASA data on MAST using this web interface.

Web Tess Viewing Tool

The Web Tess Viewing Tool a great way to find out if any particular star is in TESS - and if so, when?