.jpg)
People often are looking for interesting things to do at night. Well here’s a secret – you just have to go out and look up into the sky. Believe me, there are some super awesome things to see. Just put your phone down and look up. Here I will discuss the best things to watch.
Should I use binoculars, a telescope, or neither?
First, let’s talk about telescopes and binoculars. I’ll go ahead and say it – if you don’t have a telescope, don’t worry about that now. A nice telescope is expensive and you actually have to know what you are doing. Plus, it requires some installation before it can be used every night.
How about binoculars? Binoculars are great. You can buy a pair for not too much, and you can even use them for more than just looking at the night sky. In addition, they are quite easy to use. Binoculars can do two things that are useful. First, they produce an enlarged image. If you look at the moon with binoculars, you can see much more detail in the craters than with just your naked eye. Here’s a quick moon tip: don’t look at a full moon. It’s super bright and you really can’t see much detail. If you wait for a nice thin crescent moon, you will see more shadows from the mountains and craters. Believe me.
The second thing the binoculars do is increase the ability to collect light. Look at your eyes (use a mirror). Pay attention to the size of your students. They are not that big, are they? Oh, they get bigger when it’s dark. But all the light your eyes detect must come through your eyes. Now look at the front of binoculars. Note that the lenses are MUCH bigger. This means that they can receive even more light. Binoculars allow you to see things that would otherwise be too dim to detect with the naked eye in the dark sky. This is especially true if you are trying to see comets or nebulae.
Look at the planets
Okay, let’s take a look at some good things to see. Perhaps the best (and simplest) thing you can see are the planets. With the naked eye, you can see five of the planets in our solar system (technically you can also see Earth). The visible planets are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. The other planets (Neptune, Uranus, Pluto) are too far away and too dim to see without much patience and a nice telescope. I mean, Neptune wasn’t discovered until 1846.