Breathe deeply when you observe

Breathe deeply when you observe, since oxygen deprivation will drastically lessen your eye’s sensitivity to light. I have heard of amateur astronomers who have taken this principle to the extreme by taking “hits” of pure oxygen occasionally, but that’s hardly necessary! Possibly I could understand using oxygen tanks if the observing locale is of ten thousand feet elevation or higher where the air is thin.

Another aspect of the oxygen issue is smoking. Off course, this activity deprives both the brain and the eye of oxygen. So if you want to see the most you can see, do not smoke while observing.

Needless to say, drinking also lessens blood-oxygen transport. However, it poses another hazard. Observing is, of necessity, done in the dark. A person whose balance is off because of drinking is asking for an accident: either falling and hurting himself or damaging valuable equipment.

Prepare Your Equipment

Finally, we cover equipment preparation.

A good place to start is to organize your eyepieces and other accessories. You will see sturdy cases advertised in various astronomy magazines which are specially designed for just such a purpose. Inside such a case will be cushioning foam rubber which will have holes cut into it. These holes will be specially shaped and sized to fit astronomical accessories. Being the miserly man that I am, I made my own accessory case. It you are interested in doing the same, my methods are described in an appendix at the end of this section.

Once you have an equipment case, it is time to stock it with the appropriate accessories. First should be several eyepieces and a Barlow lens to give you the range of magnifications you desire.

While the charts I supplied in the previous section are fine for getting acquainted with the heavens, they do not show the planets (whose positions are constantly changing). Get a good set of star charts or sky mapping software for your PC, laptop or PDA. Of the latter electronic devices, I find a PDA to be the most useful since it shares the laptop’s portability to even the most remote observing areas, but is much less cumbersome to use when I am at the eyepiece. If gadgets are not your thing, the star charts supplied in most astronomy magazines are more than adequate for this purpose. Should your interest extend to deep sky objects, you might want to purchase either a star atlas or the aforementioned sky mapping software. Many of the best deep sky objects are contained in what is termed The Messier Catalog. In this online book I am supplying you with a number of charts of my own creation which will be adequate for finding some of the most spectacular of the Messier objects and other deep sky objects of interest.

Remember the flashlight specially prepared to produce red light that I mentioned in Learning Your Way Around The Night Sky? Such a light source is important if you are to read your star charts without ruining your night vision.