By ALAN M. MACROBERT
Did you know you can see a galaxy two-and-a-half million light-years away with your unaided eyes? Craters on the Moon with binoculars? Countless wonders await you any clear night. The first step is simply to look up and ask, "What's that?" When you do, you're taking the first step toward a lifetime of cosmic exploration and enjoyment.
But what, exactly, comes next? Too many newcomers to astronomy get lost in dead ends and quit in frustration. It shouldn't be that way.
What advice would help beginners the most? A while ago, the Sky & Telescope editors got together to brainstorm this question. Pooling thoughts from more than 100 years of collective experience answering the phones and mail, we came up with the following pointers to help newcomers past the most common pitfalls and onto the route to success.
1. Learn the sky with the unaided eye.
Astronomy is an outdoor nature hobby. Go out into the night and learn the starry names and patterns overhead. Use the monthly naked-eye star charts in Sky & Telescope, the hobby's essential monthly magazine, or in its more beginner-oriented sister magazine, Night Sky. Or download our free Getting Started in Astronomy flyer (which only has bimonthly maps). Even if you live in a densely populated, light-polluted area, there's more to see up there than you might imagine.
Sky & Telescope illustration; photo Akira Fujii
It takes practice, but sooner or later you'll be able to trace out star patterns in the sky with the help of star charts.
Even if you go no further, the ability to look up and say, "There's Polaris" or "That's Saturn" will provide pleasure, and perhaps a sense of place in the cosmos, for the rest of your life.
2. Ransack your public library.
Astronomy is a learning hobby. Its joys come from intellectual discovery and knowledge of the cryptic night sky. But you have to make these discoveries, and gain this knowledge, by yourself. In other words, you need to become self-taught.
The public library is the beginner's most important astronomical tool. Comb the astronomy shelf for books about the basic knowledge you need to know, and for guidebooks to what you can see out there in the wide universe. Read about those stars and constellations you're finding with the naked eye, and about how the stars change through the night and the seasons. If your library doesn't have enough, cruise your local bookstores (not to mention our own online store). And check the magazine racks for Sky & Telescope. It offers a big, user-friendly sky map each month, observing tips and projects for all skill levels, and reports on frontline astronomical research.
Sky & Telescope / Craig Michael Utter
The Internet has put a gateway to the entire astronomy world on everybody's desktop. But what beginners really need is a coherent starting place, and that usually means books.
Of course the Web is a tremendous resource. But the Web is a hodgepodge. There are excellent beginner's sites (hey, you found this one!), but what you really need right now is a coherent, well-organized framework into which to put the knowledge that you will pick up as you go along. In other words, you need books. Go to the library.
3. Thinking telescope? Start with binoculars.
Binoculars make an ideal "first telescope" — for several reasons. They show you a wide field of view, making it easy to find your way around — whereas a higher-power telescope magnifies only a tiny, hard-to-locate bit of sky. Binoculars show a view that's right-side up and straight in front of you, making it easy to see where you're pointing. (An astronomical telescope's view, by contrast, is often upside down, is sometimes mirror-imaged as well, and is usually presented at right angles to the direction you're aiming.) Binoculars are also relatively cheap, widely available, and a breeze to carry and store.
SkyWatch / Chuck Baker
Even lightweight binoculars will reveal hundreds of cosmic wonders, from lunar craters and double stars to galaxies millions of light-years away.
And their performance is surprisingly respectable. Ordinary 7- to 10-power binoculars improve on the naked-eye view about as much as a good amateur telescope improves on the binoculars—for much less than half the price.
For astronomy, the larger the front lenses the better. High optical quality is also important, more so than for binoculars that are used on daytime scenes. Modern image-stabilized binoculars are a tremendous boon for astronomy (though expensive). But any binoculars that are already knocking around the back of your closet are enough to launch an amateur-astronomy career.
4. Dive into maps and guidebooks.
Once you have the binoculars, what do you do with them? You can have fun looking at the Moon and sweeping the star fields of the Milky Way, but that will wear thin pretty fast. However, if you've learned the constellations and obtained detailed sky maps, binoculars can keep you happily busy for years.
Sky & Telescope photo
A neat star-chart trick is to make a wire ring the size of your binocular's or finderscope's field of view. Slide it from point to point on the chart, and you'll see the star patterns that will appear in your view as you navigate the sky. Here we're narrowing in on NGC 2392, the Eskimo Nebula in Gemini (dark green symbol), using Sky Atlas 2000.0. See our star-hopping article to learn more on navigating the sky this way.
They'll reveal dozens of star clusters, galaxies, and nebulae. They'll show the ever-changing positions of Jupiter's moons and the crescent phases of Venus. You can identify dozens of craters, plains, and mountains on the Moon. You can split scores of interesting double stars and follow the fadings and brightenings of numerous variable stars. If you know what to look for.
A sailor of the seas needs top-notch charts, and so does a sailor of the skies. Fine maps bring the fascination of hunting out faint secrets in hidden sky realms. Many guidebooks describe what's to be hunted and the nature of the objects you find. Moreover, the skills you'll develop using binoculars to locate these things are exactly the skills you'll need to put a telescope to good use.
Plan indoors what you'll do outdoors. Spread out your charts and guides on a big table, find things that ought to be in range of your equipment, and figure out how you'll get there. Plan your expeditions before heading out into the nightly wilderness.
Continued on Page Two
© 2005 Reprinted with permission from Sky Publishing Corp.
