To truly appreciate astrophotography, we need to learn to navigate the night sky. With practice, we will be able to instantly identify what we are seeing above in the night sky and also identify which would therefore be great targets to observe or shoot.
The best way to learn the night sky is by using a free software called Stellarium.
Explore the menu options by hovering the mouse along the left bottom corners.
Left Corner : These are allow you to set you location, search objects, set time and date,
Bottom Corner : See constellation patterns, overlay their names/labels and show the RA Dec grid
The RA Dec grid is your coordinates. RA stands for Right Right ascension measured in hours and Dec stands for Declination measured in degrees. This is this as a fixed coordinate system that can be used to pin point location of any object in the night sky irrespective of date and time or your location.
Because the earth revolves around the Sun, we see different parts of the sky depending on seasons. We can see this by simply changing date in Stellarium.
Winter Sky - Main objects visible from Northern Hemisphere in winter are very well documented here.
Autumn Sky : Main objects visible from Northern Hemisphere in winter are very well documented here.
Summer Sky : This is a great time to shoot the band of the Milky Way galaxy starting from the southern sky. Main objects visible from Northern Hemisphere in winter are very well documented here.
Spring Sky : Main objects visible from Northern Hemisphere in winter are very well documented here.
Another way to look at the night sky is with the Milky Way as your guide. The horizontal arc here is the Northern Hemisphere ground horizon and the arc stretching from top to bottom is the band of the Milky Way we see from our perspective. Note all the constellations through which the band passes. These are constellations where a lot of the Nebula will be found as remember that Nebulae are explosive remains of dead stars and most number of stars are in the spiral arm of our galaxy i.e the Milky Way band.
So search what objects lie in these constellations and you will be amazed at the celestial treasures waiting for us to uncover.
But this is our perspective from within our galaxy. The intriguing question is what is someone else's perspective who is looking at our galaxy from the outside ? Imagine an alien astro-photographer using a powerful telescope is trying to discover the Milky Way, perhaps hoping to find nebulae and even signs of life. What would they see...
This is the likely image an astro-photographer would capture. While they would admire the image, they would likely not even notice an insignificant star ( our sun ) in an insignificant sub arm of the galaxy ( Orion Spur )
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