Best Beginner Night-Sky Targets by Season (Northern Hemisphere)

New stargazers often ask what they should actually look at. The good news is that the sky has a set of showpiece objects that are easy to find and look good in modest equipment, and many show up even from suburban gardens. Here are seven classic targets, grouped by the season when they are best placed in the evening for mid-northern latitudes. All the facts below come from the Wikipedia articles listed in the sources.

Many of these are “Messier objects”, from the catalogue of the 18th-century comet hunter Charles Messier. He observed them with a refractor of only about 100 mm (4 inches) aperture from downtown Paris. That is a good reminder that they suit small telescopes.

Winter

The Orion Nebula (M42), in Orion. Find Orion’s Belt, the three stars in a row, then look just below it for the “sword”. The middle “star” of the sword is the Orion Nebula. At magnitude 4.0 it is one of the brightest nebulae in the sky and is visible to the naked eye even from light-polluted areas. Through binoculars or a small telescope, the glowing gas is obvious. It lies about 1,270 light-years away. At its heart is the Trapezium, a very young star cluster named after the pattern its four main stars make.

The Pleiades (M45), in Taurus. Follow Orion’s Belt up and to the right, past the orange star Aldebaran, to a small, misty dipper-shaped group. This is the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, about 444 light-years away. It is the Messier object nearest to Earth and the star cluster most obvious to the naked eye. Wikipedia notes it can be seen even from places with significant light pollution. Binoculars are the ideal instrument: they show dozens of blue-white stars in one field.

Spring

The Beehive Cluster (M44), in Cancer. Cancer is a faint constellation between the bright stars of Gemini and Leo. Under dark skies, the Beehive looks like a small fuzzy patch to the naked eye. In binoculars it bursts into a swarm of stars. It holds around 1,000 stars in total. Galileo resolved it into 40 stars with his early telescope in 1609, and the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus called it the “Little Cloud”.

Summer

The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules (M13). Find the “Keystone”, a lopsided square of four stars in Hercules, about one third of the way from Vega to Arcturus. M13 sits on the Keystone’s western edge, about two thirds of the way from Zeta Herculis to Eta Herculis. In binoculars it looks like a fuzzy round star. A small telescope starts to show its grainy texture. It contains several hundred thousand stars and lies about 22,000 to 25,000 light-years away. Edmond Halley discovered it in 1714.

Albireo, in Cygnus. Albireo marks the “head” of the Swan, or the foot of the Northern Cross, at the opposite end from bright Deneb. To the naked eye it is a single star. A small telescope splits it into an amber star (magnitude 3.1) and a blue-green companion (magnitude 5.1), 35 arcseconds apart. Wikipedia calls it one of the best contrasting double stars in the sky. It is about 420 light-years away.

Autumn

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31). This is the nearest major galaxy to our Milky Way, about 2.5 million light-years away. At magnitude 3.44 it is visible to the naked eye on moonless nights, even from areas with moderate light pollution. It looks like an elongated smudge. Binoculars show its bright core. Be realistic: you won’t see the spiral arms from a typical backyard, but knowing that the light left it millions of years ago is a thrill of its own. In 964 CE the Persian astronomer al-Sufi described it as a “small cloud”, the earliest known reference to a galaxy beyond our own.

The Double Cluster, in Perseus. In the constellation Perseus lie two star clusters side by side, NGC 869 and NGC 884. Both are visible to the naked eye as a hazy patch, and they look superb in binoculars or a low-power telescope. They lie about 7,500 light-years away. Hipparchus catalogued the patch as early as 130 BCE.

Tips for success

• Start with binoculars. Five of these seven targets look good in ordinary 7×50 or 10×50 binoculars. See our guide to choosing your first binoculars.
• Use low power. In a telescope, start with your longest-focal-length eyepiece (the biggest number in mm). It gives the widest, brightest view and makes objects easier to find.
• Let your eyes adapt. Your eyes need about 20–30 minutes in the dark. Fuzzy objects such as M13 and M31 look much better once they have adjusted.
• Avoid the Moon. A bright Moon washes out nebulae and galaxies. Clusters and double stars cope better.
• Use a chart. A planisphere or a star atlas helps you find each constellation. Our guide to using a planisphere explains how.

Once you’ve seen these seven, you’ll have a feel for the main types of deep-sky object: nebulae, open clusters, globular clusters, double stars and galaxies. Then you’ll be ready for the rest of the Messier catalogue.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Nebula
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beehive_Cluster
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_13
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albireo
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Cluster
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_object

Photo: ImagePerson, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Lviatour, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Taavi Niittee, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons