alt Hacker NewsA practical guide to observing the night sky for real skies and real equipment
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Even if you don't have a telescope or binoculars, you can still enjoy naked eye star gazing. The book that got me started and which I highly recommend: The Stars: A New Way to See Them by H. A. Rey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars:_A_New_Way_to_See_Th...
If you're thinking, "But I live near a big city, I won't be able to see anything due to light pollution", you can still see quite a bit, even with the naked eye. Go outside after sunset, and just sit or lay down, and stare straight up - you're very, very likely to see satellites going overhead.
They look like small moving stars, and can be easily distinguished form airplanes by the lack of any blinking lights, and their speed (and surprisingly brightness in some cases) in the night sky.
I live in the NYC area, next to a large airport and several big cities, and a big school stadium that'll light up the sky when the lights are on, and can still see them zooming by overhead.
(And you can install the ISS Detector app to get notified when the ISS and the Tiangong are going to be visible overhead in your area.)
Nice! I recently bought a Dwarf 3 smart telescope and immediately hit the same problem — figuring out what to look at and when. I ended up building my own solution that takes a different approach: https://astraview.app
I live in rural Maine so it may not be the same everywhere but a few months ago I was just enjoying the outdoors and noticed all these fast moving objects. Turns out they were satellites. You could see one or two fly over every couple of minutes.
At first I thought this was only a list of night time objects to view, but then I saw the site has an extensive tools section.
One of those tools is a Bahtinov Mask, which I’ve never heard of, but I’m going to 3d print one from this site and use it to try and focus my scope.
One thing I fondly remember from the 1990s is how newspapers used to publish monthly sky charts. That is how I got started with stargazing, with nothing more than cut-outs of those charts and my naked eyes.
I had two plain star charts as well, one for the northern hemisphere, which I used constantly, and one for the southern hemisphere, which I rarely needed. But plain star charts cannot show where the planets would be from month to month. So I relied heavily on the monthly charts published by the newspapers. Retrograde planetary motions were hard to estimate manually unless you were an expert. At the age of 10, I wasn't an expert. So the monthly charts were very useful to me.
When my father switched to a different newspaper, I was flabbergasted to discover that our new paper did not publish sky charts. What an outrageous omission! So I promptly wrote a letter to the editor about it and posted it. A month later, the newspaper published my letter in the 'Letters to the Editor' column. Since it was a national paper, I was beaming with joy at the thought that people across the country would read my complaint. Another month later, the paper began publishing sky charts.
These days we can take a mobile phone app and point it at the sky but there is a certain joy in simply exploring the night sky with minimal assistance, appreciating the beauty and mysteries of the universe and pondering philosophical questions like why we are here and why any of this exists. I do not want to sound like a lunatic (and if I do, I suppose I do not mind) but I think it is one of the most immersive experiences a human being can have with the universe.
As a bonus, it can be quite useful to impress your girlfriend too, provided she is of a certain kind. I remember when I met mine about a decade ago, we would sometimes be stuck at traffic lights and I would start calling out objects in the night sky. "That's Jupiter up there. That's Betelgeuse, the red giant star that could go supernova one day. That's Rigel, one of my favourite stars. And there are the Pleiades, one of the most photogenic star clusters. If you draw an imaginary line through the three stars of Orion's Belt and extend it eastward, you reach Sirius, the brightest star." And so on. Within a few weeks, she started joining in, and we would try to name as many objects as possible before the lights turned green again. Fortunately, she found all this entertaining rather than seeing it as evidence of complete derangement, and we are now married.
If all will pardon the name drop, I'm listing my all-time most revered astronomy resource. It's not quite what is was 20 years ago, and I no longer look up much, but I've managed to get a smile from it with each visit. It's one of the few websites I still have an affection for.
Deep diving into the celestial. Couple this site with dark sky app for road map tools into the universe.
The text is vapid AI slop. Is there anything "practical" or "curated" about this?
If you really wand to know about observing the night sky, talk to a human who does it as a passion project, not an AI, and especially not an AI pushing affiliate links. Check out my astrophotography blog (link in profile), and if you want to learn more just email me. My domain @gmail.com will get you to me