1,001 Celestial Wonders to See Before You Die: The Best Sky Objects for Star Gazers (Patrick Moore’s Practical Astronomy Series)
1,001 Celestial Wonders is a guide to the night sky’s brightest and most fascinating objects. Each target is accessible to amateur astronomers using medium-sized telescopes from a dark site. In fact, many are so bright they remain visible under moderate light pollution, as from the outskirts of a city or the suburbs of a town. The book provides a chronological target list, making it easy to use. No matter what night you choose, this book will show you many of the most memorable objects to observe, whether you are using a small telescope or even binoculars, or an instrument of larger aperture. This is far more than just a list of interesting objects. It is structured so that objects of various observing difficulty are included, which will help readers become better observers, both encouraging beginners and challenging long-time amateur astronomers. This book is designed to be easy-to-use at the telescope, and observers will appreciate each object’s standardized layout and the book’s chronological organization. Finally, many amateur astronomers function best when presented with a list! Even the Meade Autostar® controller features a ‘best tonight’ list (although the list is far less comprehensive and detailed than the catalog provided in this book), a feature that has proved extremely popular. 1,001 Celestial Wonders offers a life-list of objects any observer would be proud to complete.
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read moreWhat Exactly Is The Milky Way?
Simply put, the galaxy is the galaxy in which we live, it contains a cluster of over two hundred billion stars including our Sun and indeed our solar system. It is only one of over one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. Our solar system is located on one of the six spiral arms of the Milky Way named Orion, if you are somewhere that has a really dark night sky and are far away from artificial light pollution you can see the Milky Way. It appears as a hazy band of light forming a large arc that spirals across the sky. It is almost as old as the universe itself, the oldest star found being over thirteen billion years old. The name itself, Milky Way, is a translation from the Greek, Galaxis, which is derived from the word milk, derived from the appearance of spilt milk in the sky. Indeed, the Milky Way was first observed by the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in the fifth century BCE. Proof of the long debated theory that the Milky Way consisted of a cluster of stars came in 1610 by way of Galileo. In 1755, Immanuel Kant correctly speculated that the Milky Way was a rotating body of a huge number of stars held together by gravitational forces similar to the solar system but on a colossal scale. And it is a colossal scale – the circumference being between two hundred and fifty and three hundred light years! As big as it is, astronomers are confronted with massive problems when trying to observe it, because the Earth is part of the Milky Way, they can’t simply look down on it to study it. So, they explore other galaxies and apply what they learn from viewing them onto the Milky Way.
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