| Jan 12, 2012


By Fred Barrett

Calling all observers! Send me your sightings. We can share what we have seen through this column. We live in a beautiful dark sky area. Don’t let what you have seen go unreported. This month I am going to give a few pointers on observing. You don’t need a telescope to look at the night sky. Your eyes roaming across the vista above will give you more wonder more than you expect.

Binoculars reveal much more of our beautiful night skies. Eyes alone will reveal 3000 or so stars. Binoculars will enlarge that number to 100,000 and more. Binoculars come in many sizes. Let’s look at a typical binocular size -7X50. The first number is the magnification - 7 times. The second number is the lens size. The bigger the lens, the more light and stars you can see. Using a telescope or binoculars will decrease the field of view and so you are looking at a much smaller part of the sky. When you increase the magnification, you decrease the size of the area of sky that you are looking at. Also, when you go for higher magnification, every movement you make shows up as movement in your field of view. I call this jitter. The best size I have found for binocular night sky viewing is 10x50. You can see a wide swath of sky with this size. They have wide enough field of view and they are not too heavy to hold steady. Take note though that with meteors showers, your eyes are the best way to view. You need to look at the whole sky.

Did you know that at this coldest part of the year that the Earth is actually closer to the Sun then it is in the summer?

Mercury is low in the western sky at the end of the month. Try and see if you can sight it and let me know what success you have had - a good observing challenge. Venus will be climbing in the southwest sky as the month progresses. It will be hard to miss –very bright! Mars, my favourite planet, will be in fine view in the middle of the month in the east. She will be more observable as February gets closer. Jupiter is still prominent in the sky to the south in mid evening. You should really get out there and watch her moons dance around the planet. Saturn and her rings are rising in the sky. She will be more of a late night view for January but will be, in February, more observable. I’ll give you a heads up in next month’s astro report.

I will close this month with an amusing anecdote about Steven Hawking. He is a brilliant cosmologist, a student of the universe, with a mind that is enclosed in a body ravaged by Lou Gehrig’s disease - ALS. That has not kept his mind from roaming about the universe. He is turning 70 this month. This is what his brilliant mind has to say about the universe: “The only mystery I haven’t solved is women.”

Please send me your observing reports. I am sure that readers will be very interested in reading those reports in this column. Let’s share together what you have seen.

 

 

If you have questions or suggestions, Fred Barrett may be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The Beginner’s Observer’s Guide by Leo Enright is available at the Sharbot Lake Pharmacy or by contacting the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada www.rasc.ca/publications, subscriptions for our very own excellent Canadian astronomy magazine, Sky News, are also available from RASC..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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