A guide to the night sky | Great British walks

Our routes walk stargazing present the best of the night skies of Britain. But you know what to watch?

The Moon

Like the sun, the moon rises roughly in the east and sets more or less to the west. He maintains his own calendar, however, arrive 50 minutes later each day. If you can see at night, which could be because it is well below the horizon. Or it may be invisible in the sky ...

How

something that is usually so bright just disappear? The moon is mostly rock-solid, if boring in its own right as a piece of coal. What makes it shine sunlight is reflected, as the moon orbits the Earth, the part that light waxes and wanes in a cycle of 29.5 days. When the moon is between Earth and the sun, no reflected sunlight reaches us (a "new moon"), while in the other side of the Earth, the entire face is illuminated before us (a "the full moon ").

Binoculars

give you a better view of the surface, but they are not indispensable. Even without them, you should be able to select the most important elements, such as Mare Tranquillitatis, the dark spot where Apollo 11 landed.

click here for moon phases, sunrise and sunset times.

Planets

Remember the nursery rhyme Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star? This is the key to choosing the planets so much light bites: in the cloudless sky, the stars shine and planets are not. These planets can be seen with the naked eye - Venus, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn and Mercury, if you're lucky - are almost always brighter than the stars also. To facilitate identification a little easier, they all seem to be in line across the sky, extending approximately from east to west, near the southern horizon in the summer, most of it in winter.

Venus is most colorful of all. The prominent after sunset or before sunrise, becomes "evening star" to "morning star" every 584 days to reach the earth in its orbit around the sun. Thank you to its brightness, it has often been mistaken for a UFO. The darkest hours belong to reddish Mars, Jupiter, yellowish white, pale yellow and Saturn.

Galaxies

does not believe that hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing millions, billions or trillions of stars. The so-called "irregular" do not have a coherent structure, but others are spiral-shaped, glasses, rings ...

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way is a spiral release of billions of stars that extend 100,000 light years. It includes all the stars that can be distinguished with the naked eye. Light pollution - and the moon - often erased, but in a clear night and the dark mass of the stars form a band slightly brighter in the sky

nearest neighbor of the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy appears as a blur near Cassiopeia (see p71), using the constellation of deep V-shaped like an arrow W pointing in the approximate direction (there will be three "arrow heads" below). As with many small objects, you may find it easier to observe Andromeda, if you look a little on the side rather than directly to him.

aa meteor showers

Every day, the journey of the Earth around the Sun is placed in contact with fragments of rock and ice known as meteorites, many of them scattered comets in their own journeys space. Transfer of at least 6.8 miles (11km) a second, most of these objects by friction burn long before they reach the ground. The paths of light produced is what we call meteors or shooting stars. A dozen times a year, things get very intense, as the Earth makes a pile of rubble. These meteor showers can last several days, with dozens of "shooting stars" per hour.

For the next 12 months, the major showers the Perseids are to be considered (up to 12-13 August), the Orionids (October 20-22), the Leonids (November 16 to 18), Geminid ( December 12-14) and Quadrantid (January 3-4). The showers are named after the constellations which the meteors appear to originate.

• Plow

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only once, and the Big Dipper is the collection's most recognizable stars in the northern sky - and most useful, allowing you to identify the North Star, also known as the North Pole or a star. The seven stars, which are the backbone of the constellation of the Great Bear, form a sort of long-handled pan. It revolves around the pole star, so the pot can sometimes prevent the "handle" or vice versa. But for now, let's say in the correct position, with the handle to the left, the PAN on the right and bottom of the plate parallel to the horizon.

To find a center Polaris in the two stars forming the right side of the tray. The star is at the bottom of Merak, one on top is Dubhe. Together they are known as pointers. To find the North Star, to extend the line to form four or four and a half times past Dubhe,. Polaris is the brightest star in this small area of ??sky

Cassiopeia

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