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Everyone knows you’re not supposed to stare at the sun for too long. Even at 1 AU (about 93 million miles), the sun can really sear some retinas after more than a few moments. But after you arrive at a star party and have gotten set up — which you should do while there’s still some light out so you get everything properly prepared and your telescope has a chance to adjust to the ambient temperature — you might hear a repetitious chorus of “When is it going to get dark?” and “What time is it?” (Full disclosure: This impatient litany could very well be coming from me. Sorry.)
Surprise! It’s a themed week. And today’s astronomy-related topic is about choosing a good site for night sky stargazing, which is no straightforward task. There are a number of factors to consider; darkness and cloud cover are simply the two most obvious. Other less apparent conditions to take into account include transparency (a measure of how much water vapor and other particulates are in the air), seeing (which is an estimate of air turbulence), light pollution and conditions on the ground.
I can’t recall if I ever mentioned it in a post, but for my birthday a few months back my boyfriend got me a telescope. A pretty flipping sweet telescope if you ask me, but of course I’m a bit biased. Anyway, we’ve taken it out a couple of times since then, but it became clear pretty quickly that we didn’t actually know how on Earth to use the thing for much beyond checking out obvious easy-to-find stellar objects like Jupiter and its moons. But that’s going to change, because recently we got a firmer toehold in the world of amateur astronomy.
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