There are many resources with which you may already be familiar and which may prove invaluable during your PhD and beyond. This list will hopefully start you off on discovering what others have made available.

Journals

Monthly Notics of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A), Astrophysical Journal (ApJ^?), Astronomical Journal (AJ), Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP), Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan (PASJ), Astronomische Nachrichten/Astronomical Notes (AN), and the pre-print server astro-ph.

Databases

SIMBAD http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/ Vizier http://webviz.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR NED http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/ NStED http://nsted.ipac.caltech.edu/ Dwarf Archives http://spider.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/davy/ARCHIVE/index.shtml

Journal Club, Seminars, and Colloquia

GoingObserving^?

For observational PhD students this may a big part of why you became interested in a PhD. As well as going abroad we have a 25cm Meade in Exeter which you are welcome to use after some brief training (and then help in astro labs...).

Conferences

Paper Reading and Writing

If you have some science you want to discuss, or paper that interests you, you should feel free to approach any member of the group. This is a large part of our training as graduate students, we won't learn much by sitting mulling things over ourselves and never speaking of our ideas. Tea/coffee time is an especially good time to approach people with your random/insightful question!

Making three-colour images

Montage for mosaicing either your own images or online mosaicing of 2MASS, SDSS, etc. data. Can then combine these using ds9.

% ds9 -rgb -red 2MASS_K.fits -green 2MASS_H.fits -blue 2MASS_J.fits & then modify scaling until you achieve the correct colur balance and bring out the features of interest.

-- Contributors: RobertKing - 02 Jul 2008