Orion’s Belt and Nebula, originally uploaded by david parmet.

Winter is both the best and the worst time for the backyard stargazer.

The best for the crystal clear skies and the some of the most well-known constellations filled with wonders like the Orion Nebula, the Pleiades and later in the season the Beehive and the Leo Triplet.

The worst because it’s so damn cold!

I shot this with the Astrotrac before losing two fingers to frostbite.

DSC_0055, originally uploaded by david parmet.

This picture was shot looking north over Cape Cod Bay. The light on the lower left is from Boston – more than 90 miles away from where I took the picture.

This is what we are losing – dark skies are quickly vanishing all over the world as the city’s insatiable appetite for bright lights grows. Even in my own little backwater town, an hour from New York City, every day it seems the security lights, the lights from the neighbor’s pool or tennis courts or the light over the back door stays on later and later.

There’s a lot you can do. Encourage the use of LEDs and other alternatives. Lobby your community to adopt stricter lighting standards. Join the International Dark Sky Association. And just turn the damn lights off.

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DSC_0228, originally uploaded by david parmet.

Last night was only the second time I’ve seen Mercury and the first time I’ve ever seen four planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn) in one night at one time.

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DSC_0018, originally uploaded by david parmet.

Spring always arrives with Leo the Lion rising in the East as Orion the Hunter leaves the scene, setting in the west. So for the next few weeks I have both right outside my back door and it’s almost warm enough to stay outside for an extended viewing session.

The last few nights have been perfectly clear – tonight is looking good as well.

From a picture shot from my backyard, the Summer Triangle.

From Vega, in Lyra, at the top, down to Deneb in Cygnus and then right to Altair in Aquila, the Summer Triangle is unmistakable in the Summer sky. Just look east, a bit after sunset. Vega should be near the zenith; the three stars are often the first to be visible in the night sky.

The MIlky Way flows right through the Triangle. If you have a nice dark night with clear skies, you should be able to see faint dust clouds and star fields.

With binoculars, you can scan the triangle and pick out most of its treasures.

More on The Summer Triangle here.

DSC_0019

Originally uploaded by david parmet

Here’s the view from the backyard of our beach house. The bright ‘start’ at the bottom is Jupiter, that’s about as high as it got over the trees.

Once you’ve had your fill of the planets, it’s time to move on to some Deep Sky Objects.. or DSOs. The first place most amateur stargazers start is with the Messier Catalog. Named for Charles Messier, a French astronomer who was more interested in finding comets than in identifying the 110 galaxies, nebulas and star clusters in the catalog that now bears his name, these objects are generally considered to be the easiest to find and offer the biggest visual bang for your buck for the beginning stargazer. Some of them you can even see without a telescope or binoculars, you just need to know where to look.

For the past few nights, I’ve been on a personal quest to find two of these objects – M65 and M66 – who along with NGC 3628 form the Leo Triplet of Galaxies.

So here you can see what I saw in my eyepiece. Click the image to embiggin. The ovals are where the three galaxies should be – M65 at the bottom, to it’s left is M66 and NGC 3628 is in the upper right.

But all I could see of the three beauties was maybe a bit of a grayish blur where M66 (the brightest of the three) should be.

So there’s the rub. And here’s the secret. Viewing DSOs with a telescope in your backyard is an exercise in learning to see. You have to relearn everything you know about looking.

I’ve learned one technique called ‘averted vision.’ It’s the art of looking not directly but just slightly away from something. There’s a real scientific explanation for why this works, something about the rods and cones away from the center in the back of the eye being more sensitive to dimmer light than the ones in the dead-on center. In this case it helped me confirm that the slight haze and blur around that M9 star was, in fact, the galaxy M66. I got this buy looking away, towards the star between the three galaxies.

Tonight the forecast calls for rain and clouds so I won’t get to go outside again. Maybe over the weekend I’ll have better luck.