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9. What you’ll see

With your eyes alone, you can see plenty of interesting objects in the night sky. But binoculars open up the Universe.

With time and practice, you’ll see the planets as discs of light, asteroids, the subtle colours of stars, nebulae, galaxies like M31 and much more. Still, there are limits.

While binoculars improve on the view by allowing you to see dimmer things, they also narrow the view. If you want to see the constellations in their entirety, look at them with the naked eye.

On the other hand, though binoculars bring things closer, they don’t magnify enough to show detail on any of the planets. And, while giving amazing views of the whole Moon, they won’t show fine detail, like crater walls or snaking valleys. Larger telescopes are needed for these.

However, even telescopes will not show some things: even through the largest scopes, the stars still appear as points of light, because they’re so far away.

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10. Get out there!

Your eyes and a pair of binoculars are enough to keep you busy for a lifetime.

With just your eyes, you can see meteors and meteor showers, aurora (Northern Lights), an occasional bright comet, whole constellations, and the sky-crossing Milky Way – our own Galaxy.

With binoculars you’ll be able to see much more. Craters and ‘seas’ are visible on the Moon, and beyond the Solar System, you’ll see double and multiple stars, globular star clusters and, nebulae and galaxies.

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18 - Brendan Alexander - Donegal Milky Way

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8. Use binoculars

If you’ve not used binoculars very often, they take some getting used to. Practise by looking at the Moon first.

Look at the Moon, then lift the binoculars to your eyes and focus while looking through them.

To help hold them steady, give them added support other than your arms. When standing, rest your thumbs on your cheek bones, and when sitting or reclining, much of the weight of the binoculars can be rested against your face.

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7. Magnify the sky

The starhop above was meant for naked-eye viewing, which is possible for M31 because it’s visible under very dark skies. But locating it through the light pollution above towns and cities, or finding even dimmer objects requires a good pair of binoculars or a telescope.

Binoculars give you some magnification, but more importantly they greatly brighten the view.

With good vision under ideal conditions, you might be able to see a couple of thousand stars with just your eyes, but using a good pair of binoculars you’ll see over 100,000.

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6. Try a starhop

The simplest things to find are the patterns formed by groups of bright stars.Once you can find your way to some of the brighter constellations, locating the dimmer ones becomes easier too.t also makes finding even dimmer objects – like galaxies and star clusters – easy too, using the technique of starhopping.

Here’s an example to get you hopping from constellation to constellation to find the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31.Under very dark skies, it’s possible to see M31 with just your eyes, even though it is dim and difficult to pick out if you don’t know just where it is.

To find it, start at the Plough. Use the Pointers to find Polaris, and then keep going past it to the constellation of Cassiopeia. It’s an easy shape to see because its brightest stars form a ‘W’. Once there, you can use the less flattened triangle of the ‘W’ as an arrow: its apex points towards M31, about 15 away.

Use your newfound skills to pin-point this beauty.

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5. Watch the sky move

The night sky changes in appearance over time. The stars keep the same positions relative to one another, but seem to move as a whole. This is because Earth spins on its axis once every 24 hours, so the globe of the sky revolves 15º to the west every hour.

But the Earth also orbits the Sun in about 365 days, resulting in stars being in slightly different positions at the same time each night.

If you stand in one spot at 9pm and see a star rising above a rooftop to the east, then look again at 10pm, that star will be 15º higher. Fourteen days later, it would be close to that position at 9pm, as the sky will seem to have moved 1º west each night.

Observing this change will give you a good sense of the motion of our planet and how it affects our view of the heavens.

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4. Judge distances

Distances between objects in the night sky are measured in angles using degrees of arc, a bit like the angles of latitude and longitude on the Earth’s globe. One degree is equal to 1/360th of a circle.

Conveniently, your fist held at arm’s length covers about 10º of the sky; three fingers are about 5º; and your little finger covers 1º.

If you want to find a dim object in the sky and a star chart shows that it is about 15º in a certain direction from a brighter, known star, then you can use your outstretched hand as a ruler to measure off the distance on the night sky. Between the two Pointer stars of the Plough, for example, the distance is about 5º.

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3. Use the star chart

To use it to look at things in different directions, hold it so that the bottom edge corresponds to the compass direction you are facing. It will then show the sky as it looks from that horizon and on up over your head.

If you don’t know which direction is which, use the Plough to find Polaris. Once you find north, the rest will follow. It’s best to use a red-light torch to see the chart in the dark – that way it won’t ruin your night vision.

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2. Get your bearings

Looking at the night sky can be confusing. Random points of light appear on a dark background, and over a few hours these points will have changed position.

The sky seems different because the Earth is rotating, but the patterns made by the stars stay the same relative to each other. This means that if you know just one shape in the sky, you can find the rest.

The best one to use as a guide is the Plough, since it is large, bright and visible year-round in the north. It also has two stars called the Pointers that point to Polaris, the North Star. Polaris is positioned almost exactly above the Earth’s axis at the North Pole, so unlike the rest of the sky it doesn’t move and shows which way is north. The Plough is also a useful pointer to other shapes in the sky.

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1. Be prepared

All you need to begin stargazing is your eyes, but you should still plan ahead. The most important thing you can do is get to the darkest place you can find where large swathes of sky are visible. There are some bright objects in the sky at night – the Moon, some of the planets, and a few dozen stars – but the dimmer things greatly outnumber them, and artificial light washes these out.
It takes your eyes up to 40 minutes to completely adjust to the darkness, so avoid looking at bright lights and, if it can’t be helped, consider wearing sunglasses before you start observing.

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Here You Can Find The Best Astronomy Books

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Here You Can Find The Best Astronomy Books

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Astronomy is an amazing hobby that anyone can participate in right in their own back yard, and a good astronomy book can help. Even if you live in a large city where there is a lot of light pollution it is likely you can still see a few astronomical objects in the night sky. Take a little trip outside of town into areas with less light pollution and you can see hundreds of objects.

While you could spend a lot of money on expensive telescopes, you can do a lot of observing with just your eyes, or a lot more with a pair of inexpensive binoculars.

The question becomes, what equipment do you need, how do you use it, and what are you looking for in the sky? This is where good astronomy books for beginners come in handy.

Why a book and not just read something online or watch some YouTube videos? Because having all the information you need in one place and organized (table of contents, glossary, index, etc) makes it tremendously easier when you are out in the dark trying to learn.

So why a printed astronomy book? Because electronic books while convenient, require a device to read and that device is illuminated which ruins your adaptation to the dark, making it harder to actually see anything. A paper book on the other hand can be lit by a dim red flashlight which will not affect your dark adaptation.

With all that being said, what astronomy books are worth your hard earned money? Here is my list of astronomy books....

4 Best Astronomy Books

Nightwatch 4th edition by Terence Dickenson is one of the "classic" books for amateur astronmers. This is a big, beautiful, spiral bound book that could easily be at home on your coffee table. To give you an idea take one part coffee table picture book, add one part really good text book, then add in one part really cool science magazine (think Omni if you can remember that far back) and you have this beautiful book.

The description online says the previous three editions have sold over 600,000 copies, and as soon as you pick the book up and open it, you understand why. It's large size makes it perfect for displaying images that are simply jaw dropping such as the star field on page 39. I also really like the star charts and the way the book lays perfectly flat.

If I have one complaint about this book it is that the book is fairly thin at 192 pages compared to 368 and 289 for the next two books I talk about.

The Backyard Astronomer's Guide is another book by Terence Dickenson and it too is considered a "classic" introductory book. While his other book I recommend, Nightwatch, I described as a combination of picture book, text book, and cool science magazine, this one is pure text book. It is a large (368 pages), heavy, hard cover book in full glorious color just like the best college text book out there, except this is one you will actually enjoy reading.

This appears to be an upgraded and expanded version of Nightwatch, it is even printed by the same Firefly Press. The paper the book is printed on and whatever press they used really makes the images pop. Unfortunately the star charts in the back are pretty, but far inferior to the ones in Nightwatch. I also see the lay flat design in the previous Nightwatch book as far superior.

If you are looking for a book that is as useful to more experienced astronomers as it is the absolute novice, this is it. Unlike many other books like this, it does not stop at the basics but instead takes you right up to the advanced levels which insures this astronomy book stays on your shelf for many years to come.

While this book is big and heavy, and is also by far the most expensive, if you could only have one book on astronomy then this would have to be it.

Author Allan Hall has an excellent no-nonsense book called Getting Started: Visual Astronomy which covers pretty much everything you need to get out and start observing in its 289 pages. I really like this book because it is written to give you the information you need to get going in this hobby quickly while skimping on the fluff and pretty pictures. This is also evident as he chose to release the printed book in black and white which makes it cheaper than the others we have discussed, although not as pretty. Given that most of the objects a beginner will see in the night sky are not colorful anyway, this makes sense and saves my money for other purchases. If you really want color, it is available for Kindle which makes it unique in this list of introductory astronomy books.

I like his conversational tone, which I also said when I recommended two of his other books on astrophotography. I don't feel preached to, talked down to, or lost in a flurry of technical terms I don't understand. I also like the fact that he has a whole slew of books about astronomy and astrophotography as well as a pretty nice website so I can get a lot of information with a single consistent tone.

Many people who are just starting out in astronomy enjoy Turn Left At Orion by Guy Consolmagno and Dan M. Davis. This is not a introduction to the hobby, but a book designed to help you find things to look at, which is also important. I would highly recommend someone new to the hobby pick up one or more of the three books above before getting this one because they will answer questions such as what the numbers on an eyepiece mean while this book will not.

So now that you know what this book is not, what it is is a nice set of objects you can view and how you go about finding them. The layout of the book is excellent and the overall quality of the book is absolute top notch. The glossary is small, but amazing, including a couple of nice drawings to explain things. I also really like the charts he has included because so many times the layout of charts are hard to understand.

This book is available in standard print edition, spiral print edition (great for use out in the field while observing), Kindle, eTextbook, iBooks and Nook making it the most available astronomy book I know of 🙂

Bonus

One of the things that really helped me when I was first starting out was my Miller Planisphere. With one of these I was able to find constellations quickly and easily and that let me find plenty of objects to view. It really was a life saver.

With a planisphere you need to purchase the right one for your location. They are typically sold by hemisphere and then latitude. Find the one with the latitude that is closest to where you are, they are not meant to be exact. There is no 42 degree latitude version so you would buy a 40 degree model for that latitude. Also, be sure to get the big one as the little one is hard to use in the dark with a flashlight, at least it was for me.

I can not over emphasize how much this little contraption helped me.

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4 Best Astronomy Books for Beginners in 2019

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Astronomy is an amazing hobby that anyone can participate in right in their own back yard, and a good astronomy book can help. Even if you live in a large city where there is a lot of light pollution it is likely you can still see a few astronomical objects in the night sky.

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From Earth our galaxy looks something like a band of milky light over a black background, as we are viewing it on its side and the billions of distant stars in our galaxy create a nice visible band of light.

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The formation and evolution of the Solar System began 4.6 billion years ago with the gravitational collapse of a small part of a giant molecular cloud. Most of the collapsing mass collected in the center, forming the Sun, while the rest flattened into a protoplanetary disk out of which the planets, moons, asteroids, and other small Solar System bodies formed.

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Stephen Hawking - Formation of the Solar System

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Stephen Hawking - Formation of the Solar System

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Stephen Hawking - Formation of the Solar System

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Astronomy is a science that studies celestial objects and events. The origin of this word refers to the language of Аncient Greece, where the root" astron" means "star", and "nomos" - "law", "culture". That is, from Аncient Greek it translates as a science that studies the laws of stars.