Star Gazing by Smart Phone and Star Chart

Many years ago, while photographing variable stars at the Maria Mitchell Observatory on Nantucket, one of the many challenges we faced (after highly changeable “seeing” conditions and having to develop glass plates in utter and total darkness – no red lights allowed) was actually finding the precise point in the sky on which to fix the telescope. That probably seems odd to astronomers who work in the field today, but we had no computer to set the coordinates - it was all "right ascension and declination" and using math to figure out what point in the sky was where. We managed of course, but there was always a bit of anxiety involved. What if we got it wrong and spent three hours collecting images of the wrong star field?

It’s been decades since I’ve done anything similar, and although I know computers do much of that work now, I’ve never experienced it myself. So imagine my astonishment just now to discover an app on my phone (I’m also new to smart phones) that can immediately identify any object in the night sky that you point your phone at. I’d heard about this technology before now, of course, but seeing it was a whole other revelation. Jupiter floating onto my screen, with a view of the planet right behind it in the night sky, was, to me, nothing short of miraculous.  

If you have a smart phone yourself, give it a try. The “Sky Map” app I used, for android phones, is free. If you know others that work well, please let us all know about them by commenting to this post. And if you don’t have a smart phone, check out the “Night Sky” page on this blog for a minute-to-minute, constantly refreshing star chart. It may be old school, but it still tells the same story. And you don’t need any of these tools to enjoy the show tonight. Just go outside. The night is dark, and the sky is filled with stars – some of them appear stationary, and some (the meteors) are streaking across the sky.