A User-Friendly Guide to the Universe (Blog # -2)

Welcome to “The Messier Pro”, a blog about the universe as seen from your backyard. First things first though, what the heck does the name mean? It might seem like a very long way to go to make a little play on words concerning my wife’s blog, but at least the name was free, and I get at least one post out of trying to explain myself! That’s a victory … isn’t it? Let me explain the long way …

When I was about seven, I got the first astronomy book I can remember, and I began learning my way around the night sky. In seventh grade, I got a telescope with a lens that was actually smaller than the human eye. (Felt a little silly about that when I worked that out a few years later.) I spent two years working with that, then I moved on to a “department store telescope” which turned out to be a cardboard tube with a single lens at the end. I worked with this for four years, and then got a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with a mirror eight inches across for my high-school graduation. Some people got cars; I’ve covered much more distance with my ‘scope, and it’s lasted for more than twenty years. I hope this establishes my bona fides as someone with a little observing experience, and someone who got here the hard way. You don’t have to do that, and I can help.

The blog is named after Charles Messier, an astronomer who lived in eighteenth-century France. Astronomy even a hundred years ago was a lot different than it is now. Consider that even the basic about how stars work wasn’t even begun to be understood until the 1930’s. An astronomer in the 1700’s spent much of his/her (there was some “her”) time mapping the skies and looking for comets. Actually, this was much of the goal; if you discovered a comet, it was named for you, and whoever died with the most comets won. How did one go about, oh, eating, during this time, you ask? (No, really, surely somebody asked that? Anybody?) Ah well, here's the answer: One would find a suitably rich person and ask, “Pardon me, but if you pay for me to have an observatory and look for comets so I can discover them, I’ll tell everyone you gave me dough.” Surprisingly, this worked. It was something on the order of Michael Jordan’s endorsements, with less of a requirement to make public appearances in one’s underwear.

A comet, when it is first discovered, appears as a small fuzzy blob of light. Messier made a list of objects in the sky that appeared as comets (small, fuzzy, indistinct) and yet did not move from night to night, so they did not count as comets. To Messier’s mind, this was a garbage list, stuff to avoid, but we know recognize these as clusters of stars, great glowing clouds of gas, and whole .galaxies. Since I have been paid at various times to show these objects to people, I can claim to be a “Messier Pro”. Too cheesy? Maybe. Let’s move on quickly. (I will also be using items off of another list of object called the “Caldwell List”, made more recently by P Caldwell-Moore for the magazine Sky & Telescope in 1995. I will, when all is finished, try to compile a “Leckenby List” of objects that new observers can find, even when conditions aren’t perfect.

Actually, my first idea had been to write a blog focusing on the night sky as seen from the upper Midwest, but I’ve also gotten interest from a couple of people outside the area, so I thought that I would aim a little more widely. Why write a blog to begin with? Aren’t there many, many astronomy websites out there, many of them listed in the box to right? Why do you need MY electrons spinning out there on the internet? There are many astronomy sites out there now, but I have not found one that combines two assumptions that I will now lay out for you. I wanted to start a site that was accessible to someone who might not have any background in astronomy. There are many of these sites out there too, but I also wanted to combine this with an idea that not everyone lives in laces that have dark skies. My basic assumption is that my typical reader is in the ‘burbs. (If you are lucky enough to live with dark skies, my site will still help you; if you live downtown, it’ll be hard to see anything. Make friends with someone with a sky.) Sure there are also places that will make the sky available to you at times (I do it at my school at least monthly), but this is *your* universe – shouldn’t you get to use whenever *you* want? I think so. This will be aimed so that someone who has not been doing this for thirty-five years will not feel left out in the dark. (Rim shot.)

Many blogs will be tied to something going on in the sky at that time. Over the next couple of months, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, the Moon, meteors and more will each have Messier Pro entries. My next entry will be about observing satellites, and why it is easier to see satellites in the summer. Many of my blogs will be about constellations; I will work my way through the sky, describing each of the constellations that can be easily observed from the mainland United States, and I will describe the constellations in three “layers”.

The first level of coverage will discuss the constellation as it can be seen with the eye. Hey, even if that’s all you got to work with, there is still a lot that can be gained by looking out at the sky with just your eyes – it’s what we had until 1609. The next level of coverage will discuss what can be seen with binoculars. Now, you won’t need to have huge or really spiffy binoculars (but if you have hem, don’t throw them away!); even small binoculars can greatly expand the universe available to you. The last level will be the small telescope. Did you get a telescope for your birthday or from some long distant holiday that’s just sitting in a closet gathering dust? Did you try to use it, only to get lost as some astronomy book/site seems to assume that you navigate the stars like Galileo, or that you can observe from a mountaintop in a National Park? I’m here for you!

NEXT BLOG: Observing Satellites, and I try to post more images!