Welcome!

In the coming months this site will slowly transform into a new and exciting website called Portal to the Universe. A cornerstone project of the International Year of Astronomy, Portal to the Universe plans to become your primary gateway to online Astronomy news, tools, and contacts. To make this possible, we need your help finding all the cool content online that's related to space.

How you can help: For the next several weeks we will be collecting seed content for our directories of online feeds (blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, ands images of the day), our index of widgets (embedable online tools for websites), and for our AstroPages yellow pages. You can use the links in the left hand sidebar to submit content to any of these catagories.

What to expect: Each of the links will take you to an online form. Once we have your data, we'll send you or the content owner an email confirming the data is correct and that we have permission to post it. If everything is correct, you're all set and you won't hear from us again until the site is ready to go live in December. As a contributer, you'll be among the first to know when Portal to the Universe goes live! In the interium, we'll allow people to browse a very boring listing of the content. Have no fear, this is only temporary and serves just help people get connected in these pre-launch days.

We're really excited to be building the Portal to the Universe for IYA2009, and can't wait to share with you all we have planned. Thanks for joining us on this adventure!

Cheers,
Lars Lindberg Christensen & Pamela L. Gay

Our Vision:

Enabling access to astronomy multimedia resources - including news, blogs, images, videos, events, podcasts, vodcasts . . . Connecting people through content and an astronomy yellow pages . . .


Our Goals:

The Portal to the Universe seeks to provide a single gateway to online astronomy content, serving as an index and an aggregator. TPTTU will feature: news-, image-, blog- and video- aggregation; a comprehensive directory of observatories, facilities, astronomical societies, amateur astronomy societies, space artists, science communication university programs; and Web 2.0 collaborative tools for astronomy multimedia community interaction such as ranking of the different services according to popularity. Additionally, a range of widgets (small applications) will be developed to tap live into the existing resources.

Our vision for the Portal is three-fold:

  1. Enabling access: To aggregate (pull) from content providers incl. all astronomy-related dynamic content (e.g. RSS feeds of blogs, images, news, etc) and distribute (push) to the users;
  2. Index and archive: To collect and maintain a central repository of links to useful information, including resources such as educational materials and more, addresses for all astronomy stakeholders such as amateur clubs, planetariums, observatories etc.
  3. Enabling communication and collaboration: Create and maintain a network of all stakeholders.


Task group:

  • Lars Lindberg Christensen (Chair)
  • Pamela Gay (Editor/Developer)
  • Fraser Cain
  • Daniel Fischer
  • Edward Gomez
  • Suzanne Jacoby
  • Mark Newhouse
  • Lars Holm Nielsen
  • Jan Pomierny
  • Pedro Russo
  • Raquel Shida



PTTU is an
International Year of Astronomy
Cornerstone Project