Here we're narrowing in on NGC 2392, the Eskimo Nebula in Gemini (dark green symbol), using Sky Atlas 2000.0. Slide it from point to point on the chart, and you'll see the star patterns that will appear in your view as you navigate the sky. A neat star-chart trick is to make a wire ring the size of your binocular's or finderscope's field of view. However, if you've learned the constellations and obtained detailed sky maps, binoculars can keep you happily busy for years. Once you have the binoculars, what do you do with them? You can have fun looking at the Moon and sweeping the star fields of the Milky Way, but that will wear thin pretty fast. Modern image-stabilized binoculars are a tremendous boon for astronomy (though expensive), but any binoculars that are already knocking around the back of your closet are enough to launch an amateur-astronomy career. High optical quality is also important, more so than for binoculars that are used on daytime scenes. Even lightweight binoculars will reveal hundreds of cosmic wonders, from lunar craters and double stars to galaxies millions of light-years away.įor astronomy, the larger the front lenses the better. Ordinary 7- to 10-power binoculars improve on the naked-eye view about as much as a good amateur telescope improves on the binoculars - for much less than half the price. The performance of binoculars is surprisingly respectable.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |