Stargazing

Constellations are still very popular today because they offer easy access for beginners in astronomy. It usually only takes a few nights before you start to see patterns in the starry sky yourself. Starting from easy-to-find constellations, such as the Big Dipper, Orion or the Pleiades, you can use star maps to feel your way to more and more constellations. If you spend the whole night observing the stars, you will quickly notice that all the stars revolve around an imaginary center. Today, this celestial north pole coincides almost exactly with the North Star at the tail end of the Little Dipper. Since the Earth's axis of rotation wobbles somewhat, the Celestial North Pole moves from one star to the next within thousands of years. Since the constellations extend around the entire earth, you can never see them all from one place. From Europe you can see about 48 constellations during the year and eight circumpolar constellations can be seen in the northern hemisphere all year round.

 

Astronomy as a hobby

To find bright constellations like Leo, the naked eye is enough. Some constellations, such as Berenice's hair, are composed of rather faint stars. Binoculars can do a good job here. As a rule, it is advisable to look at celestial bodies visible to the naked eye, such as comets or the star clouds and dark nebulae of the Milky Way, alternately with and without binoculars. Binoculars with high magnification should be used for stabilization with a tripod. Amateur astronomers use portable telescopes to observe planets, stars and nebulae. Not only does the sky have to play along, but the observation must also be planned in advance. If you want to photograph celestial objects through the telescope, you also have to take care of the corresponding tracking of the telescope during the exposure time. Suitable servo motors are offered in specialist shops for this purpose.

 

Constellations of the southern hemisphere:

Antlia

(Ant.)

Air pump

Apus

(Aps.)

Bird of paradise

Caelum

(Cae.)

Caelum

Camelopardalis

(Cam.)

Giraffe

Carina

(Car.)

Keel of the ship

Centaurus

(Cen.)

Human-Horse Hybrid Creature

Chamaeleon

(Cha.)

Chameleon

Circinus

(Cir.)

Deviders

Corona Australis

(CrA.)

Southern Crown

Crux

(Cru.)

Southern Cross

Dorado

(Dor.)

Swordfish

Fornax

(For.)

Oven

Grus

(Gru.)

Crane

Horologium

(Hor.)

Pendulum clock

Hydrus

(Hyi.)

Small Water Snake

Indus

(Ind.)

Indian

Mensa

(Men.)

Mesa

Microscopium

(Mic.)

Microscope

Musca

(Mus.)

Fly

Norma

(Nor.)

Goniometer

Octans

(Oct.)

Octant

Pavo

(Pav.)

Peacock

Phoenix

(Phe.)

Mythological Bird

Pictor

(Pic.)

Painter

Piscis Austrinus

(PsA.)

Southern Fish

Puppis

(Pup.)

Aft deck of the ship

Pyxis

(Pyx.)

Compass

Reticulum

(Ret.)

Net

Sagitta

(Sge.)

Arrow

Sculptor

(Sci.)

Sculptor

Scutum

(Sct.)

Shield

Sextans

(Sex.)

Sextant

Telescopium

(Tel.)

Telescope

Triangulum Australe

(TrA.)

Southern Triangle

Tucana

(Tuc.)

Toucan

Vela

(Vel.)

Sail of the ship

Volans

(Vol.)

Flying fish

 

Model Description:

With the Planet Trail, we would like to convey to you the distances that open up between the celestial bodies of the solar system. In the model below, you can see the stars that together form the Big Dipper. Distances also play a major role in constellations. But even more so our line of sight. If you look in from the front, you can see the Big Dipper well. If you look in from the side, you can see what this constellation looks like if you didn't look at it from the Earth's point of view. The reticle also shows how far away the individual stars are from Earth in light years.

 

375 m to Uranus

266 m to Neptune

 

Distances in space

Astronomy is about unimaginable distances. Who can imagine how long 1 million kilometers are. The greatest distance you can travel in a straight line on Earth is 40,000 km and for that you have to go around the Earth on the equator. To make a million kilometers, you would have to circle the earth 25 times. It is only 380,000 km to the moon, i.e. only 9 and a half laps around the equator. It is already 150 million kilometers to the sun, i.e. 3,750 laps around the equator. Instead of calculating in several thousand laps around the equator, it makes sense to take the distance between the Earth and the Sun as a benchmark. In astronomy, this distance is called the Astronomical Unit or AU for short. The planet Jupiter is no longer 628.5 million kilometers, but only 4.2 AU away. The outermost planet of the solar system, Neptune, is 30 AU away and the Voyager2 probe, the farthest traveled man-made object, is just 133.25 AU away in 2023. The Oort Cloud - the last frontier of the solar system - extends to a distance of 100,000 AU. So that the numbers do not become too large again, 100,000 AU can also be described as about 1.6 light years. A light-year is the distance that light travels in a vacuum within a year, i.e. 9,460,730,472,580.8 km. If we now want to travel to the nearest star, we have to travel 4.246 light years (Lj.) to Proxima Centauri. The brightest star in the night sky – Sirius – is already 8.583 light years away. The North Star is 447.6 light years away and the center of our galaxy, the black hole Sagitarius A*, is even 26,673 years away. The next galaxy that can be seen with the naked eye is the Large Magellanic Cloud. This star island is already 165,000 light years away and the bright Andromeda Galaxy is 2,500,000 years away.

 

What can be seen on the star maps?

On the star maps of the northern and southern sky, stars of different sizes are drawn. Some of them are connected by lines because they form constellations together. Around the constellations, areas of the sky are delimited with dashed lines. They show the regions of the sky that are associated with the constellations. Between the constellations, many more stars are drawn, which are usually small and can only be seen with the naked eye in very good conditions. The large blue band that represents the Milky Way is representative of a large number of stars that can hardly be distinguished with simple instruments. The different brightness and surface temperature of the stars are represented on the map by their size and color. The brightness is given in magnitudes on a logarithmic scale. A 1st magnitude star is about 2.5 times brighter than a 2nd magnitude star. The surface temperature of the stars is getting hotter and hotter from red to yellow to blue. Red dwarf stars have a temperature of 2,000 to 5,000°C, while blue giant stars can reach 10,000 and 50,000°C. The most important star, our Sun, is not marked, just like the planets of the solar system. They move too fast across the starry sky for that. Instead, the ecliptic is drawn, a line that describes the orbit of the sun, but which actually shows the orbital plane on which all planets – including the Earth – move around the sun. In addition to stars, other celestial bodies are drawn:

Nebulae consisting of gas and dust.

Planetary nebulae, which are formed when a medium-sized star flings its outer layers away from it at the end of its life.

Super Nova remnants, spherical gas nebulae formed by the explosion of a star.

Open star clusters, with a few thousand stars in close proximity.

Globular clusters, with up to 100,000 very old stars standing close together.

Galaxies, distant islands of stars that consist of several 100 million stars and can often only be recorded as smeared points of light.