Kron, R.,&Butler, S. “Stars and Strips Forever.” Astronomy (February 1999): 48. On the Sloan Digital Survey.
Kruesi, L. “What Do We Really Know about Dark Matter?” Astronomy (November 2009): 28. Focuses on what dark matter could be and experiments to find out.
Larson, R.,&Bromm, V. “The First Stars in the Universe.” Scientific American (December 2001): 64. On the dark ages and the birth of the first stars.
Nadis, S. “Exploring the Galaxy-Black Hole Connection.” Astronomy (May 2010): 28. About the role of massive black holes in the evolution of galaxies.
Nadis, S. “Astronomers Reveal the Universe’s Hidden Structure.” Astronomy (September 2013): 44. How dark matter is the scaffolding on which the visible universe rests.
Schilling, G. “Hubble Goes the Distance.” Sky&Telescope (January 2015): 20. Using gravitational lensing with HST to see the most distant galaxies.
Strauss, M. “Reading the Blueprints of Creation.” Scientific American (February 2004): 54. On large-scale surveys of galaxies and what they tell us about the organization of the early universe.
Tytell, D. “A Wide Deep Field: Getting the Big Picture.” Sky&Telescope (September 2001): 42. On the NOAO survey of deep sky objects.
Villard, R. “How Gravity’s Grand Illusion Reveals the Universe.” Astronomy (January 2013): 44. On gravitational lensing and what it teaches us.
Websites
Assembly of Galaxies: http://jwst.nasa.gov/galaxies.html. Introductory background information about galaxies: what we know and what we want to learn.
Brief History of Gravitational Lensing: http://www.einstein-online.info/spotlights/grav_lensing_history. From Einstein OnLine.
Cosmic Structures: http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr1/en/astro/structures/structures.asp. Brief review page on how galaxies are organized, from the Sloan Survey.
Discovery of the First Gravitational Lens: http://astrosociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ab2009-33.pdf. By Ray Weymann, 2009.
Gravitational Lensing Discoveries from the Hubble Space Telescope: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/exotic/gravitational-lens/. A chronological list of news releases and images.
Local Group of Galaxies: http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/localgr.html. Clickable map from the Atlas of the Universe project. See also their Virgo Cluster page: http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/galgrps/vir.html.
RotCurve: http://burro.astr.cwru.edu/JavaLab/RotcurveWeb/main.html. Try your hand at using real galaxy rotation curve data to measure dark matter halos using this Java applet simulation.
Sloan Digital Sky Survey Website: http://classic.sdss.org/. Includes nontechnical and technical parts.
Spyglasses into the Universe: http://www.spacetelescope.org/science/gravitational_lensing/. Hubble page on gravitational lensing; includes links to videos.
Virgo Cluster of Galaxies: http://messier.seds.org/more/virgo.html. A page with brief information and links to maps, images, etc.
Videos
Cosmic Simulations: http://www.tapir.caltech.edu/~phopkins/Site/Movies_cosmo.html. Beautiful videos with computer simulations of how galaxies form, from the FIRE group.