Your kids and gazing at the stars – an educational experience

This article is for an anybody that wants to start star gazing, but doesn’t know how or where to start so if you read this, you will realize it is very easy and most important, it is cheap and you can even do it without spending money. So now that you know it won’t cost you money, what do you need to be able to explore the Universe around our home planet? Luckily there is nothing much but it could really help if you got yourself a Star Chart, available in books or any thing which talks about the Zodiac.

Some of them look much uncomplicated with a few stars with lines linking them to more complicated ones which appear like wheels. Available from planetarium or any observatory, you can get the cheapest of the lot as you only need to get familiar with the brightest star and the rest can be incorporated by yourself.

If you intend to spend any money on a telescope, do not buy a cheap one – it really will be waste of money and won’t help you enjoy your new interest at all. Imagining you buy one of these, the revolution of the earth could make the star vanish from your screen in such high speed that you could completely lose track of it and start your search from where you started. This exercise is so exasperating that you might end up viewing through your telescope all night long and finally decide to put it away in the box where it belongs.

My second tip is a far cheaper option but one that will bring many nights of star gazing and all you need to do here is lend, borrow or buy a normal 10×50 set of binoculars. This can enable you to view the total constellation, the star bunches, the moon along with several other planets. You are extremely fortunate that the school where you go to as well as the town library should have a good stock of books which deal with stars, star gazing, the universe as well as the solar system and this could throw open a wide vista of knowledge and resources for you to learn more about these things.

Books that contain good start charts should be the preferred target and don’t worry too much if you cannot get the latest edition because as far as you are concerned, the stars will not have moved or changed. The first thing you do is to find out more details about Orion or the Southern Cross or Scorpio and familiarize yourself with their appearance on paper and then look at the sky and try to find them out. The location of the Southern Cross is the south and as night moves on, you can see the Orion traversing over your head from East to the West. Do not be too concerned if you cannot see it all the time as it will often rise later in the night or early hours of the morning.

If you are wondering whether you need to study a lot regarding this, well, not really but as you progress with your star exploration, your natural curiosity would demand that you want to know more, like where they came from and prepays where do they end. This you can get in books written for children as this will give you the most elementary information. So in conclusion, what are the things you need for star gazing? One star chart and one eye and the Universe is within your grasp. Only then do you need binoculars and once you know enough about the stars and how and why they move, then you can invest in a decent telescope.

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