Another important asset in your arsenal of astronomy is a good sky chart, a good Planosphere, a point of reference for where to point your telescope. They don't call it space for a reason. One of the things you need to consider though is which one's going to appropriate for your use. Here's a simple Planosphere right here. Now as I hold this up, this guy will show me all the visible constellations and stars and some of the highlights that are out tonight. You buy them based on the area of the country that you're in. Here in Anacortes we're at 48 degrees north latitude, so the fifty to sixty works pretty well. What you would do here on the sides is adjust the time and the date to the date that you're looking outside at your objects there. And what you do is in the center right here is where Polaris is referenced. That's the bright star off the Little Dipper. So you hold this Planosphere up once you have your dates set, you hold it up against Polaris, and as you see it this is the way the night sky unfolds around you. One of the things people have trouble with referencing on a Planosphere is that it's a dome on a flat surface. So I like this as a quick reference, but for astronomy for star hopping I have a preference over here for a nice star chart. There are many great books and reference guides available on the market and this is one of my favorites here. Every new employee with us gets a copy of this book right here, and a test on chapter five, which you will not be subject to. One of the ways I use this book right here is one of the great references I like is it has all the names of the stars right here for me. When I first started using a telescope, I used a GoTo telescope, and it told me to center the star Arcturus in the eyepiece. Now I had no idea what star Arcturus was or where it was located, so what I did is I went to the star list right here and I can see that Arcturus is located in the bright constellation Bootis. So now that I have a reference for the constellation I'm looking for I've gone a little bit further into the book and I've pulled up the sky maps. And the reason this is valuable is because now I can see that Arcturus here is the brightest constellation in the star, the constellation Bootis. Now I know where to point my telescope, I know where to look and I have a point of reference. This is also handy because it's going to tell me all the cool things to look at around that constellation, whether I have a GoTo telescope or one that's manually operated, I can use this constellation as a reference. If there's a nice double up here, I can point off this star here. If I know that Messier 3 is over here, I can use Arcturus as a way to slew to that area right there to help me pan and tilt to that location. If I've got a GoTo telescope, it tells me M53, M64, NGC4565 are all bright and visible for me. I have no idea what any of those things are, but I hit the M button, I hit 31, and boom... my telescope goes there for me. Very nice, very fancy, very good reference guide for you to get started with astronomy, and I have one other I'd like to show you as well. Now this stylish sky chart here is one of my favorite for manually operated telescopes. Where I'm going to use either a finder scope or a red dot finder to find the objects I'm looking for. This one in particular happens to be Messier objects. So, as I open it up right here, what I'm going to see is where each Messier object is located in reference to the constellations around it. So I'm learning my constellations. I know the night sky a little bit, and if I want to see M20--Messier 20--I can see that it's just off the point of the constellation Sagittarius right here. Each Messier object is referenced like that throughout the book, so as long as I know the night sky a little bit I have a place to start. Again, this is star hopping, this is how you find objects on your own. M30, right off this constellation right over here. If I want to go to M31 and 32, I can reference Andromeda, the constellation Pegasus, I have a reference for how to find that now. So keep in mind, even with a GoTo telescope, once you've gone beyond the guided tour, the fifteen or the twenty objects, it's just going to sit there waiting for you to tell it what to look at. So having a chart like this or charts that were in this book here, shows you the constellations in the sky, all the cool things to see around them, and is a very valuable reference guide and something you're going to need as well along with your little red flashlight.
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