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People are often looking for interesting things to do at night. Well, here’s a secret: just go outside and look up at the sky. Trust me, there are some super awesome things to see. Just leave the phone and look up. Here, I’m going to go over all the best things to look at.
Should I use binoculars, a telescope, or both?
First, let’s talk about telescopes and binoculars. I’ll go ahead and say, if you don’t have a telescope, don’t worry about it right now. A good telescope is expensive and you need to know what you are doing. Also, it requires some setup before using it every night.
What about binoculars? The binoculars are fantastic. You can get a couple for not much, and you can even use them for more than just looking at the night sky. Plus, they’re pretty easy to use. Binoculars can do two useful things. First, they produce an enlarged image. If you look at the moon through binoculars, you will be able to see many more details in the craters than just the naked eye. Here’s a quick moon tip: don’t look at a full moon. It’s very bright and you can’t really see many details. If you expect a thin thin crescent moon, you will be able to see more shadows from the mountains and craters. Trust me.
The second thing binoculars do is increase the ability to collect light. Look into your eyes (use a mirror). Look at the size of your students. They’re not that big, are they? Oh, they get bigger when it’s dark. But all the light that your eyes detect must pass through your eyes. Now look at the front of a binocular. Note that the lenses are MUCH larger. This means they can capture even more light. With a binocular, you can see things that are otherwise too faint 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 see some good things to see. Perhaps the best (and easiest) to see are the planets. At a glance, 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 dark to see it without much patience and a good telescope. I mean Neptune was not even discovered until 1846.