Resources
Where to read when a problem stops making sense, and where to find more problems once it starts.
General resources
Shared Google Drive folders full of papers, notes and PDFs. Start here before digging through the archives below.
Olympiad archives
Past papers with official solutions. Each link goes to the competition's own homepage, where the PDFs are hosted and kept up to date.
International
International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics
The main international competition. Official site hosts theory, data analysis and observational papers with full solutions from every edition since 2007.
United Kingdom
British Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympiad
BAAO and the Astro Challenge papers, all with detailed mark schemes. Excellent long-form astrophysics problems at exactly IOAA theory difficulty.
United States
USA Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympiad
First round and national exam archives with solutions. Strong multiple-choice sets for fast concept drilling.
India
Indian National Astronomy Olympiad
HBCSE hosts NSEA and INAO question papers and solutions. Problems lean heavily on careful reasoning over heavy algebra.
China
Chinese National Astronomy Olympiad
One of the strongest national programmes. Materials are reached through the IOAA participating-countries directory.
International
Community archive of past IOAA problems
Community-maintained collection of past IOAA problems organised by year and round.
Reading material
Tagged with the topics each one covers.
Textbook
- An Introduction to Modern AstrophysicsCarroll & Ostlie
The standard reference for olympiad-level astrophysics. Chapters 1-3 cover the celestial sphere, orbits and the magnitude system.
Stellar AstrophysicsGalactic & Extragalactic AstronomyCosmologyCelestial Mechanics & Orbits - Introductory Astronomy and AstrophysicsZeilik & Gregory
More compact than Carroll & Ostlie, with excellent worked problems on coordinates, time and telescope optics.
Spherical Astronomy & CoordinatesObservational Astronomy & PhotometryStellar Astrophysics - Spherical AstronomyRobin M. Green
The definitive treatment of the celestial sphere, spherical trigonometry and time systems. Dense but authoritative.
Spherical Astronomy & Coordinates - Measurements and their UncertaintiesHughes & Hase
A short, practical guide to error analysis, least squares fitting and chi-square. Exactly the toolkit of the data round.
Data Analysis
Lecture notes
- Astronomy NotesNick Strobel
Free, well-illustrated introductory notes covering the whole syllabus at a conceptual level.
Spherical Astronomy & CoordinatesPlanetary ScienceObservational Astronomy & Photometry - Ohio State Astronomy Lecture NotesOhio State University
Clear university-level notes on stars, galaxies and cosmology with derivations you can follow line by line.
CosmologyGalactic & Extragalactic Astronomy
Website
- HyperPhysics. AstrophysicsGeorgia State University
Quick concept maps and formula references. Good for refreshing a relationship mid-problem.
Stellar AstrophysicsCosmologyCelestial Mechanics & Orbits - Stellarium WebStellarium
Browser planetarium. Indispensable for checking coordinate, rising/setting and constellation questions against the real sky.
Spherical Astronomy & CoordinatesObservational Astronomy & Photometry - Cosmology CalculatorEdward L. Wright (UCLA)
Converts redshift into distances, lookback time and scale factors. Use it to sanity-check cosmology answers.
Cosmology - NASA Exoplanet ArchiveNASA / Caltech
Real transit and radial-velocity data. Great source for building your own practice problems.
Planetary Science