To the extent possible under law, the contributors to this project have waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work. This work is published from: United States. The project home is https://github.com/fordsfords/astronomy/tree/gh-pages. To contact me, Steve Ford, project owner, you can find my email address at http://geeky-boy.com. Can't see it? Keep looking.

Star Hopping

One of the many pleasures of astronomy is "star hopping". Some people use setting circles, or even a computer operated telescope, to point at whatever object they want to see. Many others, including myself, have discovered that the thrill of the chase is almost as great as looking at the intended object.

Star hopping consists of starting out pointing your scope at an easily found bright star that happens to be close to your intended target. Then you gradually work your way over to the object, using a star map to show you the way. When you first start out, it can be slow going (especially since the view in the scope is often oriented differently than the map). But when you finally get to your destination, you will not only have a feeling of accomplishment, you will also have seen some nice sights along the way.

I will be putting some hints of my own on this page soon. Until then, here are some other pages that tell you how to do it:

There are also some books on star hopping. I haven't seen any of them, but here are some references I found: