Saturn

Believe it or not, amateur astronomy has gotten cheaper. Many of you out there may not know what I am talking about so let me get into it a little deeper. The invention of a telescope mount called the Dobsonian has lowered the cost of telescope mounts which were always relatively, very expensive. This simple mount now allows someone to buy a large 12 inch or better reflecting telescope for a low price. Years ago, a scope this size would have cost double the price, and this is when the average wage was $7200 per year. But very few people are interested in owning a telescope of this magnitude or any telescope for that matter. So what astronomy resources are available to them for the occasional view of the stars?

You could go out in your back yard on a dark night with your trusty binoculars and see quite a bit of interesting stuff. If the moon is out, it makes a fascinating subject. Before testing your binoculars, make sure they are not too powerful. Yes that's right, a pair of too powerful binoculars will make the image you are looking at seem to dance around. It is almost impossible to hold a pair of 8 power or higher binoculars still enough for observations. You need a tripod. You can even look at stars. You won't see any colors but you will see the points of light. Saturn and Jupiter might just be visible. Yes you can have fun with your binoculars but remember this, if it is daylight NEVER look at the sun with any optical instrument directly, it can blind you.

Hourglass Nebula

If you have a computer there are some excellent astronomy software packages out there. One that I use is called RedShift Version 5 by Maris. You can create sky conditions backwards or forwards for 10,000 years. I sometimes like to use it to see conditions for certain historical events. You can set it to show you the sky over Egypt when the pyramids were built or to look for the star of Nazareth during the birth of Jesus. The settings are only limited by your imagination. It can be updated also. You can add any new objects such as asteroids, comets, or man made objects to its database, giving you very realistic simulations. Want close ups of the planets, you got them? Even movies can be saved along with screen saves. I find this program great even for the occasional user.

Also available is the mother of all astronomy databases. Its name is NASA. I am sure everyone has heard of it. Just about anything you ever want to see, astronomically speaking, is located there. There are many different portals that bring you to different parts of NASA which specialize in different areas. For example you may want to see the planets in our solar system so you would go to http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/welcome.htm, there are also photos and information on the planets offered on some of the other NASA sites. If you wanted to see information on Galaxies you could go to http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/active_galaxies.html. One of the most popular areas of NASA is human space flight. This material is available at http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/home/index.html. NASA's sites are so huge that it would take you a lifetime to sift through all the material if that was even possible. You have to remember that new data is always coming in. I would like to mention that if you are interested in space probes you can find them at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/. Please don't think that the sites I have given you are the only places to find such information at NASA. Data is spread out among many different NASA sites. For cool photos the Hubble telescope site is a great place to go to, you can find it at http://hubblesite.org/gallery/. If you have nothing to do some day, just go to your favorite search engine and punch in NASA and have fun looking through all the different sites.

Not to be outdone, the European Space Agency also has it own websites. They are run out of Italy. I can not link to the addresses because of their copyright but I will give you some and you can copy them into you browser address bar if you like, make sure not to copy the '.' at the end of the sentence, it will prevent the address from working. The main page is http://www.esa.int/esaCP/index.html. They offer a seup similar to NASA but without such a comprehensive amount of material. One has to remember that NASA has been in business a lot longer. The space technology Site is located at http://www.esa.int/techresources/index.html, and the satellite tracking station at http://www.vilspa.esa.es/ . The European Space Agency has some fine photographs online.

Orion Nebula

Government agencies are not the only places online that have interesting astronomy facts and photos. The site known as Space.Com is a great place to visit. Not only will you see some great photos but they feature up to date space news and have interesting Science and Technology sections. It is also a lot of fun to search the web for astronomy sites, you never know what you will come up with. I found one once where they had a 12 inch telescope that you could aim by making a request by email to point it at a particular target. You would then see the object on your computer. This was a neat idea. So happy hunting on your astronomical journey, and remember, have fun.