74 results

Stargazing Basics

Some Useful Astronomy Terms for Beginners

Take a few minutes to learn the most important astronomy terms.

International Space Station

Stargazing Basics

Take a "Sat-seeing" Tour

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s the International Space Station! Learn how to spot Earth's artificial satellites.

Stargazing Basics

What Are Celestial Coordinates?

"Right ascension" and "declination" tell you where your telescope is pointed in the sky. But what do they really mean?

Porcelain sun dial

Stargazing Basics

Time In the Sky and the Amateur Astronomer

While civil time is based on official edit, the celestial clockwork follows its own rhythms.

Stargazing Basics

Observing from the City

With the stars increasing being lost amid the light pollution of our urban areas, is there no hope for an astronomer in the city? Fortunately, there's still a lot of observing that can be done.

ready for the stars

Stargazing Basics

My "Flapping Roof" Observatory

By day my observatory looks like an ordinary (if rather grandiose) garden shed. At night the roof sections go down and back up. They "flap" like a bird's wings.

ready to observe

Stargazing Basics

My Place in the Dark

Twenty weekends and countless trips to the building-supplies store later, I'd done it — I had an observatory to call my own.

plenty of elbow room

Stargazing Basics

An Observatory with Sails

After working at Sky & Telescope for nearly a decade I got the chance to build the observatory I'd always wanted.

Looking at the exit pupils

Choosing Your Astronomy Equipment

A Pupil Primer: How Big Should a Telescope's Exit Pupil Be?

Image brightness, magnification, and why the old ideal of a 7-millimeter exit pupil is not so ideal at all.

Seeing

Stargazing Basics

A Scale of Seeing

Amateurs long have recorded the seeing quality in their observing logbooks on a rather subjective scale of 1 to 10, with 1 hopeless and 10 perfect.

Aligning an equatorial mount on Polaris

Stargazing Basics

Accurate Polar Alignment with Your Telescope

Long-exposure astrophotography requires an accurately aligned equatorial mount.

blueprint

DIY: Astronomy Projects & Guidance

8 Backyard Observatory Mistakes to Avoid

Here are a few potential problems that you might not see on your blueprints.

Stargazing Basics

Binocular Basics: Glossary of Binocular Terms

Exit pupils. Eye relief. Image stabilization. What matters most for astronomers? Our expert explains it all.

outstanding collimation aid

DIY: Astronomy Projects & Guidance

Collimation Tools

Three tools are commonly used to collimate Newtonian reflectors.