The Easiest Way To Learn The Deep Sky... Guaranteed!
How To Find Any Object in the Heavens
You'll begin with simple and intuitive explanations to help you easily master the layout of the night sky so you can find any deep-sky object you wish. You'll discover...
- The pros and cons of the two main types of finder scopes available today, and which one is best for you
- Types of commonly observed variable stars you as an amateur can observe, and how to can use a basic knowledge of these stars to help professional astronomers with their research
- Double, triple, even quintuple star systems resolvable with a backyard telescope; plus, a few oddball stars that defied classification and explanation by astronomers for decades
- A simple but powerful analogy that will help you understand the celestial coordinate system... an essential skill for finding faint objects in the deep sky
- Money-saving alternatives to the more expensive eyepieces on the market (you could save hundreds of dollars with these tips alone)
- The origins and nature of the two main types of star clusters you can see with your telescope
- The truth about the four major types of light pollution filters, which ones are right for you, and which are a waste of money for a visual observer
- The nature and composition of dark and diffuse nebula which harbor the building blocks of brand new stars and planets
- And shattered remnants of massive stars that blew up as supernovae, the most violent event known in the universe.
- Which type of red light is best for seeing your way around in the dark without ruining your night vision
- How your eye has evolved to see two different kinds of light, and what it means to you as an astronomer
- Go-To mounts... are they only for those too lazy to learn the sky? Or are they an indispensable tool for the amateur astronomer
- Massive globular clusters, called the "elder statesmen" of the galaxy, which are stable clusters of hundreds of thousands of ancient stars almost as old as the universe itself
- Simple accessories to keep unwanted stray light out of your eye (and why stray light will instantly ruin a night of stargazing)
- The three main galaxy shapes you're likely to encounter, and what the shape of a galaxy tells us about its evolution and size
- The most important tool used by professional astronomers use classify stars
- Splendid open star clusters of sparkling blue-white stars along the plane of the Milky Way, including one cluster that's only a few million years old
- One simple technique that will increase the sensitivity of your eye by 20-40x... in less than a second
- How to condition your eye to detect the maximum amount of faint light (fail to do this, and even the most expensive telescope is almost worthless)
- How the stars, moon, and sun move across the sky from day to day and month to month, and how these movements influence what you see each night
- The basic science behind why stars have different colors (and the answer to the question we're frequently asked... why there are no green stars)
- A 6-step technique for reading a simple star map- and how to use a full-sky map to find the major constellations in all four seasons, in both the northern and southern hemispheres
