Steve Owens

Stargazing is a fascinating hobby, but there’s an awful lot to gaze at up there. Eighty-eight constellations and hundreds of other objects both bright and faint mean that wherever you look when you’re stargazing, there’s something to see. If you want to make sense of it all, and make sure that your kit is properly set up, this Cheat Sheet is here to help.

As an excited newcomer to stargazing, you’ll want to get outside and start straight away. Here’s a quick list of targets that you can tick off on your way to mastering the night sky. If you’re hunting dark-sky targets, you’ll need to wait for a night when the Moon isn’t in the sky.Stargazing target: The MoonEarth’s closest celestial neighbour is a splendid sight in the night sky, even if it does spoil the view of fainter objects.

Following are ten things to look for the next time you’re lucky enough to be out stargazing under a dark sky. You will have to travel to see everything discussed here: some are only visible from certain parts of the Earth and at certain times of year.Dark-sky stargazing: So many stars!The first thing you’ll notice as you move from city to countryside is the sheer number of stars overhead on a clear night.

Stargazing through binoculars or a telescope is hugely rewarding, but imagine if you could capture stunning images of what you see to share with the world. Astrophotography awaits, and with recent developments in equipment, amateur stargazers are beginning to obtain images that rival those that were possible with professional telescopes only decades ago.

Most stargazers are content with just using their eyes, whether unaided or looking through a pair of binoculars or a telescope. You may be one of them, but every so often, you may see such a beautiful sight in the night sky that you want to photograph it. There are a few different ways you can capture astronomical images using a camera: Starscape astrophotography uses just the camera lens to capture the image, as you would with a daytime landscape shot.

Astronomers measure a star’s brightness using something called the magnitude scale, where each star – or planet or faint fuzzy – has a magnitude brightness value. When looking up at stars from the Earth – which you’ll do – astronomers measure how bright the star appears to them. This is the star’s apparent magnitude.

The Moon is the Earth’s nearest neighbour in space, and when you’re stargazing, it can be the brightest thing in the night sky. It’s also one of the most amazing sights seen through even a small telescope. If you look at only one thing through a telescope, it should be the Moon. You need to observe the Moon in just the right conditions.

If you use binoculars for your stargazing, you need to get them into focus before you begin. Once your binoculars are focused, the stars you see should look incredibly sharp. You can focus most binoculars in the same way. Just follow this simple step-by-step guide:Adjust the separation between the two eyepiece lenses so that they’re at the same spacing as the distance between your pupils, called the interpupillary distance.

Orion is great signpost constellation to use for your stargazing. In fact, it may be the very best, because you can use the stars of Orion to find seven other constellations immediately around it.The objects you can find using Orion as a signpost are:Orion’s Belt to Canis Major: Picture Orion as a hunter standing upright, with the stars Betelgeuse and Bellatrix marking out his shoulders, and Saiph and Rigel marking out his feet.