Free Guide to Naked-Eye Astronomy

Tammy Plotner, president of Warren Rupp Observatory, writes "Are you looking for all the best of what's up in the night sky for the year 2007? Then be my guest and download my free e.book — '365 Days of SkyWatching'! (Brought to you courtesy of The Universe Today.) Each day is specifically geared to give you the best of what can be seen with the unaided eye, binoculars, and small telescopes and even has challenge objects for seasoned observers. It's beautifully illustrated and contains many special features, such as anotated lunar maps. Please feel free to pass it along to anyone in the astronomy community and enjoy!" For anyone who'll be in that neck of the woods (central Ohio) next October, Warren Rupp's Hidden Hollow event looks really fun.

Comments

You'll need these

[chanrobi]

Although each day is fairly descriptive and tells you about a new object, it doesn't tell you where to find it. Here's what the book recommended:

www.astrosurf.com/astropc/cartes
www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky

The first one is a downloadable program, the second is web based. For the open source crowd i'd recommend Stellarium.

http://www.stellarium.org/

Celestia is also interesting in that it allows you to travel off the surface the earth. More akin to Starry Night pro. Not as useful to accompany the guide but fun to play around with. Also open source.

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/download.html

Have Fun!

I tried it last year

[Anonymous Coward]

I used the 2006 ebook and I can say that this is pretty good stuff. There is content for many kind of instruments: double stars that require a 12" to separate to interesting phases of planets visible with binoculars. Did you know that you can see the Saturn rings with a 4"? Me neither but thanks to Tammy Plotner I was able to look at them. Next time that you are awake at 2am, take 30 mins, the ebook and binoculars and let the universe unravel before your eyes.

You will want to upgrade your instrument after a few nights and you'll find plenty of tips on picking the right telescope in the ebook.

Re:I tried it last year

[Abcd1234]

Did you know that you can see the Saturn rings with a 4"?

Absolutely. In fact, if the seeing is good, you can even make out the Encke Gap. Not to mention detail you can make out in the atmospheres of both Saturn and Jupiter. Oh, and the phases of Venus. And a ton of deepsky objects, too (there are some lovely nebulae and globular clusters well within reach of a 4" reflector, even under light-polluted skies. Objects like the Wild Duck Cluster or Hercules Cluster are really quite breathtaking, especially after spending 20 minutes starhopping trying to track them down).

Really, a decent 4" reflector coupled with a pair of lenses, which can be had for a few hundred bucks, can withstand many many nights of observing before a larger instrument becomes necessary.

Re:I'm impressed...

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

I've been to Cherry Springs several times and also attended the event at Spruce Knob in WV. They sky is absolutely incredible to the point of the Milky Way actually casting a shadow. You'll often find dozens of astronomers on both fields during the new moon.

Check out the Yahoo group for Cherry Springs if you are interested in venturing up.

Re:Wow. Slashdotted WordPress

[cpm]

Web page:
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/d836baa0e91f81cdd 5e6e15dbc88fa61/index.html

PDF [Size: 23.3Mb]:
http://www.mirrordot.org/media/6eeaa081830de8a6476 656a76d6ae669/365days2007.pdf

H.A. Rey

[ajsnow]

I flipped through a few pages (at amazon; it was already /.ed by the time I visited the link). Those star maps are ok. But for my money, by far the best guides to stargazing are the two books H.A. Rey wrote about it: The Stars: A New Way to See Them and Find the Constellations . I've never seen anyone else who actually makes stargazing as accessible they way he did -- his renderings of the consetllations actually make sense, unlike almost all the others I've seen. The books are for true beginners but The Stars also provides plenty of information to geek out on once you've figured out what you're doing. I read these as a kid 'til my copies were tattered and have never found anything better.

(Most of you know Rey by his much more famous works: he and his wife wrote the Curious George books.)

Direct link to the book.

[Fraser Cain]

Wow, I didn't think this would get onto Slashdot. Anyway, I enabled WP-cache, so the server can handle the load now.

Here's a direct link to the book, just in case the server goes down again:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/astronomycast/365day s2007.pdf