I’ve never understood how the ancients, when they looked up at the heavens and saw the stars, managed to tell which was which — let alone make out celestial representations of crabs, oxen, lobsters, slow cookers and the rest of it. I don’t mean to sound unancient and lacking in wisdom, but all I can see up there is a bunch of stars. Not that this isn’t the most amazing thing in, or more accurately not in, the world. I am fascinated by astronomy. I just can’t tell which one is Mars, which is Alpha Centuri and how to work out which heavenly smudge is the rest of our own dear Milky Way and which is a bit of stray cloud.
Two years ago, I was writing a feature on amateur astronomy and visited a surveyor in Oxfordshire. As I arrived, late because of bad weather and traffic, he greeted me, then shot upstairs to his observatory. “Just need to look at something urgently,” he said. His wife ushered me up after him.
“We’ve a report of a gamma ray burst,” he explained, punching keys on two computers at once like Mission Control. “They’re quite rare. We think they signify the birth of a massive star or the creation of a black hole.”
“Crumbs,” I said. “Good job I took a short cut with the satnav, I might have missed it. When did it start?”
“Hmm,” he replied. “About four to six billion years ago.”
So you see why I’m fond of astronomers. In the main, they make Patrick Moore seem normal.
At about that time, the most fantastic gadget came out for people like me, who have an idle interest in astronomy but not a scintilla of application sufficient to make us do any.
The Celestron SkyScout star locator, which costs under £200 in the UK, is a hand-held device that looks a little like an old-fashioned cine camera. It identifies stars, constellations, planets and galaxies in the night sky. You simply point it up until a star is in the middle of the viewfinder, press the ‘Target’ button and listen to it tell you which of the 6,000 heavenly bodies visible to the naked eye you’re looking at.
It also delivers a lecture on the image in your crosshairs, along with fascinating facts where relevant about other mad-as-cheese astronomers — chaps such as Tycho Brahe, a plump Danish nobleman with a pet moose and a false nose, who, nearly 500 years ago, charted the heavens using only his eyes, telescopes having not been invented.
I thought the SkyScout was pretty extraordinary until I came upon this year’s star gadget for stargazers, the £1,300 Meade ETX-LS telescope, which actually locates whatever you want to look at and does all the millimetre-sensitive adjustments automatically, a series of motors and gears whirring away as it does so. The unique ETX-LS seems almost too good to be true.
For astronomy dilettantes, working out which distant pinprick of light is Jupiter, which is Betelgeuse and so on is more than a headache — it’s a deal breaker. I suspect more new telescopes are abandoned barely looked through than are ever used regularly.
Best of all, the Meade, like the SkyScout, has built-in GPS, so it can be used anywhere on the planet and will pretty much immediately work out where it is. It also has all the world’s star maps for the foreseeable future in its capacious memory, so as soon as you turn it on, it can tell you what’s visible at that moment from where you are, as well as what’s going to provide the best viewing.
Oh, and the machine also has interesting, if slightly patronising, commentaries to listen to as you’re gazing. The ETX-LS isn’t cheap, it’s not light and it would probably be sneered at by ‘real’ astronomers, but so what? It’s fun and it’s endlessly interesting. If you are buying in the UK, speak to the Astronomy and Nature Centre in Cambridgeshire.
One final honourable mention: an astronomy aid for your travels that doesn’t involve you carrying any kit at all or spending more than a few pounds — two iPhone apps, Starmap and Starmap Pro. With the help of the iPhone 3GS’s compass, these can provide a near SkyScout experience. Pretty magical stuff, too.
For more information visit meade.com, astronomyandnature.com
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