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People are often looking for interesting things to do at night. Well, here’s a mystery – you just have to go out and look up at the skies. Trust me, there are some awful things to see. Just hang up your phone and look up. Here, I will go over the best things to look at.
Should I use Binoculars, a telescope, or both?
First, let’s talk about telescopes and binoculars. I’m going to go ahead and say – if you don’t have a telescope, don’t worry about that right now. A nice telescope is expensive, and you need to know what you are doing. Plus, it needs a bit of adjustment before you can use it every night.
What about binoculars? Binoculars are excellent. You can get a pair for not too much, and you may even use them for more than just staring at the night sky. In addition, they are very simple to use. Binoculars can do two things that are useful. First, they produce an expanded image. If you look at the moon with binoculars, you can see a lot more detail in the pits than with just your naked eye. Here’s a quick moon tip: Don’t look at a full moon. It’s very clear and you can’t see much detail. If you wait for a nice thin crescent moon, you can see more shade from the mountains and ridges. Trust me.
The second thing the binoculars do is to increase the collection capacity of light. Look at your eyes (use a mirror). Notice the size of your pupils. They’re not that big, are they? Oh, they get bigger when it’s dark. But all the light your eyes find must come through your eyes. Now look in front of a pair of binoculars. Note that the lenses are BIG larger. This means they can collect even more light. With a pair of binoculars, you can see objects that are too close to be found by the naked eye in the dark skies. This is especially true if you are trying to see comets or nebulae.
Take a look at the planets
Okay, let’s get to good stuff to see. Probably the best (and simplest) thing to see is the planets. With the naked eye, you can see five of the planets in our solar system (technically you can also see the Earth). The visible planets are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. The remaining planets (Neptune, Uranus, Pluto) are too far away and too dim to be seen without much patience and a nice telescope. I mean, Neptune wasn’t even discovered until 1846.