This section is intended to help you explore the night sky from your location on any date, at any time. You will be able to answer the question: “When I head outside tonight at, say, 9 p.m., what am I going to be able to see?” You will also learn how to plan for special events, like meteor showers and lunar eclipses.
For a given location, what you can see in the sky on any given night depends on the date and time. The stars that are visible at 9 p.m. on a December night are very different from the ones you would see at 9 p.m. in June, for example. And the Moon and planets follow their own unique celestial paths – their positions, and their brightness, vary from month to month and year to year.
TheSky includes a command that will display a select list of objects that will be visible in your night sky on the current date. You can set the parameters of this list to choose the kinds of objects you’re most interested in seeing.
To generate a What’s Up Observing List:
1. Go to the Tools menu.
2. Select the Manage Observing List command.
3. Click the What’s Up Setup tab.
4. Select the Viewing Time for the list.
5. Select the Optical Aid that you will be using.
6. Click the What’s Up? button.
7. Click the Close button.
Clicking the What’s Up? button creates and shows the list of objects that are visible from your location in tonight’s sky on the Observing List window. When you highlight an item, observing notes are displayed.
Some of these objects, and the data displayed with them, may be unfamiliar to you. We’ll be describing most of the information in the What’s Up? command in more detail on page 296.