You're here because you're interested, like me, in learning about space exploration from your vantage point. I've been interested in viewing the night skies for over 35 years when my parents bought a 4" refractor scope for me for Christmas. Until recently, however, I never really took the time to go outside and look up with the intention of locating and identifying celestial objects.
About 8 months ago I purchased a 6" reflector scope for my wife mostly because we do spend a great deal of time outdoors and because it was only $200 brand new. She is also interested in the night skies and has been a great influence on my desire to locate and identify especially since I purchased a copy of Starry Night Astronomer for her on her birthday which just passed.
She almost immediately loaded it on her notebook and began exploring. Her simple first goal was to find "The Little Dipper". It's a fond childhood memory for her from her days spent with her grandmother in her home state of Alaska.
During our first few nights out with the purpose of looking skyward she taught me how to find the duck constellation Cygnus, the "W" which is Cassiopeia
As she began to show me the things she was learning and we started gazing skyward I became more interested as well. Dragging the 6" scope out and setting it up is sometimes a hassle and it has no azimuth adjustment or tracking guides whatsoever so it's really just a point and shoot. Any magnification over about 50x is very difficult to use because of this reason so I decided to bring out a little pair of 3x50 binoculars. Amazing. I mean it's very amazing at what you can see just through a small pair of binocs like that.
For the first time in my life I was able to locate and identify The Pleiades, also know as The Seven Sisters and Messier's 45th object M45. To the naked eye, at least to mine, this looked like a little blurry spot in my eyes just a little below and to the left of Mars. Then I got really interested and started finding all sorts of things. Oh if my dad had only lived long enough to have the Internet! It was really he who fed my interest as a child.
As I began to look at the Web for more information I realized that I was going to have to learn a bit of new terminology just so I could understand what I was reading. It seemed, at first, that even the most elementary websites used technical terms and presented data about a particular planet, star, galaxy or other point of interest in such a way that I felt lost. I would see the photo which I could understand but when it was accompanied by text like: Right Ascension 00 : 42.7 (h:m); Declination +41 : 16 (deg:m); Distance 2900 (kly); Visual Brightness 3.4 (mag); Apparent Dimension 178x63 (arc min), I was lost.
Since I'm a reasonably intelligent, grown man trying to decipher this information I realized that what we could use is at least one more website for amateur astronomers which explained the basics and how to understand what you're reading. Even though I searched for a good website like Introduction To Astronomy, or Astronomy 101, Basic Stargazing or Amateur Astronomers, I still couldn't find a place to teach me my ABC's and 123's! Even the simplest sites I found didn't have a good dictionary or explanation of the most basic terms.
So here we are! And, thanks to the folks at Blogger.com you who have come here with the same level of understanding and types of questions shared by thousands of other beginners can have a part of the discussion as well. I'll publish what I can, when I can but you don't need to be silent on your questions, answers and even discoveries. What we share together we learn together. So if I'm too elementary for you today come back in a few weeks or months and maybe I'll have a little more knowledge and skill and we can discover together.
AddMe.com, Search Engine Marketing
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment