Getting started

Let’s face it. Stargaz­ing can be a demand­ing hobby. It can be tough on your fam­ily life. The only rea­son my lovely wife Sue puts up with my late nights away from home is that I’m doing “research” for this column.

Besides, you need expen­sive equip­ment, the skies are spoiled by out­side light­ing, and many of the objects you see in tele­scopes look at first like faint smears of light.

My own expe­ri­ences with my first, rick­ety, home­made ‘scope were pretty awful.

After some strug­gle, I was finally able to find the Androm­eda Galaxy, a whirling island uni­verse, a pin­wheel of 300 bil­lion stars.

Admit­tedly, it didn’t look like much from my well-lighted backyard.

Even so, I was excited. I had found the ANDROMEDA GALAXY. All by myself. It looked like a smudge, but there it was.

I ran into the house and dragged my wife into the back­yard. I prob­a­bly should have told her what I wanted before we got outside.

“What is it? What is it?!” she said in a pan­icky voice.

“Look, look, look,” I panted, point­ing at the scope.

She looked. “Oh, a smudge,” she said flatly.

My jaw dropped. “But it’s the ANDROMEDA GALAXY, a whirling island uni­verse, a pin­wheel of 300 bil­lion stars!!”

“Yes, dear,” she said. “It’s a very nice smudge.”

There are a cou­ple of lessons to be learned from this experience.

The first is NEVER to drink 12 cups of cof­fee before you go stargazing.

The sec­ond is not to expect too much of your­self and oth­ers. Objects like galax­ies are incred­i­bly far away, and dim.

To appre­ci­ate them, you have to train your eye to fer­ret out faint detail — what expe­ri­enced stargaz­ers call “learn­ing to see.”

At first, look at objects you know you’ll be able to see even with­out a tele­scope. They will look even bet­ter in your scope, and they’re easy to find. The moon and plan­ets like Jupiter and Sat­urn fall into this category.

Take a good, long look. You’ll be sur­prised at the detail that begins to appear after you’ve stared at an object for a while. The dark bands on Jupiter begin to resolve into oval storms and swirling clouds. Divisions

begin to appear in the rings of Saturn.

For far away objects like the Androm­eda Galaxy, you’ll need some spe­cial techniques.

1. Look at pho­tos of the objects you are plan­ning to observe. That way you can impress your observ­ing part­ners by pre­tend­ing to see fea­tures that aren’t really vis­i­ble in the scope.

Seri­ously, if you know a detail is there, you’ll know exactly what to look for, and often you’ll see things that you wouldn’t have oth­er­wise seen.

2. Pro­tect your night vision. You’ll see a lot more once your eyes are fully adapted to the dark. Often, that takes over an hour, so think twice before you use a flash­light to look at a star map. Also, use a dim red light to do so.

Expe­ri­enced stargaz­ers use a red LED flash­light or wrap a piece of red cloth around the front of their white-light flash­lights. My wife still occa­sion­ally asks, “Honey, do you know what ever became of my red silk blouse?” What can I say? Red light doesn’t spoil your night the way white light does.

3. Stargaze in rural areas far from city street lights. If there are out­side lights in your observ­ing area, you must neu­tral­ize them. I block them by observ­ing behind trees and build­ings. My men­tor, the irre­press­ible Biff Smooter, uses a 22-caliber squir­rel gun. His way works bet­ter, but mine avoids police intervention.

4. Use an old stargazer’s trick called “averted vision.” Don’t look straight at the fuzzy thing you’re observ­ing in your scope. Look just to the side of it, catch­ing it out of the cor­ner of your eye. Because your retina is more sen­si­tive at the edge than at the cen­ter, you’ll see more.

5. Try rock­ing your tele­scope or binoc­u­lars gen­tly. We see mov­ing objects bet­ter than sta­tion­ary ones, a rem­nant of an ear­lier time when we had to worry about fast-moving saber-toothed tigers.

6. Don’t fake it. Occa­sion­ally, at our pub­lic pro­grams at Perkins, folks pre­tend to see the fainter objects just to sat­isfy the per­son who was show­ing them stuff in their ‘scopes. (“Hmm, yes, very inter­est­ing. Well, time to go home now. Bye.”)

7. Get some help from expe­ri­enced stargaz­ers. At Perkins, ask the tele­scope oper­a­tor to tell you what to look for in the eyepiece.

Old Biff used to say things to me like, “Dang it, Tom, it looks long and skinny like one of them good Peru­vian cee­gars.” It helped a lot to know what to look for.

Also, ask the expert to describe the exact loca­tion of the object in the field of view of the scope. He or she will say things like, “between those two bright stars at the lower left.” You still might not see it, but at least you’ll know where to look.

8. Keep look­ing. Keep try­ing. You’ll see more detail the 20th time you look than the first.

If you can over­come the beginner’s blues, you will know, as few on the planet do, the glo­ri­ous panorama of the uni­verse. It’s worth the extra effort.

Posted by Tom Burns on Sep 11 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.