"How To Know The Night Sky As Well As You Know The Streets of Your Own Home Town"So You Want To Be A Stargazer?
Have you gazed in wonder into the sky on a dark, clear night? The Moon, the crackling stars, and the graceful arc of the Milky Way across the sky have held humanity in awe since the time of our earliest ancestors.
If you've arrived at this web page, then you too must wish to know the night sky. Perhaps, for one reason or another, you never had the chance. But as you read this page, you'll discover an astonishing resource that will make it easy to learn the stars and constellations as well as you know the streets of your own home town.
Once you follow the sky tours in this resource, not one person in a thousand will know as much about the night sky as you do. And you will learn to easily find some of the most spectacular sights in the night sky, including...
- Two dazzling star clusters in Taurus that look better in a $50 pair of binoculars than in a $10,000 telescope
- A number of massive ancient red supergiant stars that are inexorably moving to the end of their lives as catastrophic supernova explosions
- A hazy patch of stars in the constellation Cancer... once used by ancient sky watchers to forecast oncoming storms, long before Galileo discovered this mysterious cloud was really a cluster of blue-white stars
- The rich star fields towards the center of our galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius, home to dozens of nebulae and star clusters within easy reach of a beginning star gazer with binoculars
- Two immense spiral galaxies visible to the naked eye (and lovely in binoculars), the light of which you see has spent more than 2 million years crossing the void of intergalactic space (these are the most distant objects you can see without optical aid)
- The "demon star" in the constellation Perseus that eclipses like clockwork every few days (you can easily see this star with the naked eye)
- A glowing blister of interstellar gas in Orion that's right now giving birth to hot, silver-blue young stars
