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It’s been a fun week full of astronomy! We started out learning how to enter the world of amateur astronomy (that was by joining the awesome Atlanta Astronomy Club in my case) and then we discovered how to find an ideal site for setting up our telescopes. Next we learned some important lessons about looking at the sun, and a little background on the practice of astrophotography. But now that the sun has (figuratively) set on astronomy week, it’s time to discover how to undertake the age-old tradition of star hopping.
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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