More binocular astronomy

Compared to just a few months ago when I made my last post, night time now comes a lot sooner and gets a lot darker, which means I don't need to be content with looking at the moon or tremendously bright things like Jupiter. I have spent a lot more time with my binoculars outside at night.

My first post about binocular astronomy back in October this year

In fact, in the past two months or so I have been out almost every single night that the skies have been clear. This is not as impressive as it sounds as it has generally been a pretty cloudy period. At one point the entire sky, honest to God, was completely covered by thick uninterrupted cloud in all directions 24 hours a day for close to two weeks. This period started not long after I had a few really enjoyable nights in a short span of time, so I was a little "hooked" and went a bit nuts when I was forced to go cold turkey so soon, especially as during the cloudy spell a used field guide to stars and planets I had bought online arrived (complete with a receipt, tucked between the pages, for its original purchase from a Massachusetts bookstore in 1996!). As a consequence I went out on the very first clear night after the clouds dispersed, even though it was a few degrees below freezing and the ground (which I've taken to lying on, more on that later) was still covered in snow. Needless to say, I'm having a lot of fun, and learning a lot, too. It's been a delight to slowly grow more and more familiar with the night sky, to recognise constellations quicker and with more confidence. Some of this has been a matter of getting reacquainted with old friends that I knew well during my stargazing childhood in Australia, while some of it has been learning new constellations which were previously never visible to me in the Southern Hemisphere. Plenty of constellations which *were* visible to me back then I apparently simply never learned. I wasn't very systematic about the whole thing, clearly.

After my first few sessions outside in a nearby park I quickly became frustrated at how fatiguing it was to try to hold the binoculars pointed steadily at targets, especially those high up in the sky, and begun wondering very quickly about buying a camping chair to bring with me and/or a tripod or monopod. I quickly lost all interest in both these ideas after discovering the unreasonable effectiveness of, as mentioned, lying on the ground, and I'm really glad I did. A huge part of the appeal of binocular astronomy is it's fundamental minimalism, it's no fuss grab-and-go, take 'em out of the bag and be observing within 15 seconds nature. Every extra accessory you introduce and every additional preparatory step crushes the spirit of the thing, just a little. At least, this is how *I* view things. There are certainly folks in the enthusiast forums with very different attitudes and approaches. I pass no judgement, and I have no doubt they see things I never will. But I am very happy to flip out a tarp if the ground it wet and leave it at that. I even managed to pretty quickly and easily level up the "lie on the ground" solution by replacing the nearby park - where the ground is, typically of parks, pretty flat - for a nearby riverbank where the ground is sloped at, I don't know, let's say 35 degrees or so. I lie on my tarp on the slope and I can point my binos from anywhere between the opposite horizon to directly overhead without having to crane my neck to any extreme angles, and I can hold targets noticeably steadier in the view field than I can when standing up. The drawback, of course, is that you have to cross the river to look in the opposite direction. I am very lucky that an ideal spot close by to me points in such a direction that, at least at this time of year, I have no shortage of interesting things to look at in just the direction it points. Not only does the slope of the riverbank help a lot, but it's also very easy to quickly get further away from urban light sources than I am in the park I started out in. I honestly did not expect this to make such a big difference, living in a largish city. After all, with a brightly lit city centre less than 10km away, I figured I would have to travel pretty far for the sky itself to get substantially darker. And indeed, this is true. But even if the sky itself does not get appreciably darker, the further you get yourself away from building lights, streets lights, traffic lights and headlights, the more your eyes will adapt to the ambient darkness by dilating your pupils and cranking up your retinal sensitivity, and this makes more of a difference than I expected.

Here's a list of so-called "deep-sky objects" (DSOs) that I can remember having so far identified with confidence, along with their Messier, New General Catalogue, or Melotte identifiers:

Alpha Persei Cluster (Melotte 20)

Andromeda galaxy (M31, NGC 224)

Double Cluster (NGCs 869 and 884)

Hyades (Melotte 25)

Orion nebula (M24, NGC 1976)

Pleiades (M45)

Three open clusters in Auriga (M36, M37 and M38)

Maaaybe I saw Kemble's Cascade, and maybe I saw M35 and/or NGC 2158 in Gemini, but I still need to catch these a second time and make sure. Of the above, the Pleiades hold a special place in my heart for not only being the one I saw first, but because I saw them by first observing it with the naked eye as a fuzzy smudge (in the not-so-dark park; at the river I can make out the individual points of light) and wondering "what could that be?", pointed the binos in that direction and found the seven sisters almost immediately and was blown away by the transformation in appearance. That was, I think, the moment I became hooked. That said, of the above the Orion nebula is indisputably the most visually impressive.