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Re: (meteorobs) Hi to all of you

Hello Philipp

I am a European like you... but live further down in Malta!
Regards your difficulty in finding constellations - this is normal when 
starting out - no need to worry!  This is what happened to me when I 
started and to everyone of us.

The best way to find your way around the sky is first to locate some bright 
and easy constellation, and then find others relative to it.  For example 
if you manage to find Jupiter in the night sky, it;s that bright yellow 
star visible to the south, then a little bit lower in the sky you should 
have no problem of locating Orion.
One thing which I found out when observing is that the constellations are 
quite larger than you imagine them from a starmap!
Orion is one big bright constellation which once you find it you will never 
forget where it is.
Then you may use Orion's stars to lead you to other constellations, for 
example, follow Orions three star belt downwards....and you end up at 
Sirius in Canis Major....go upwards and you are in Taurus near the Pleiades.
Take a line from Rigel through Betelgeuse and you end near Gemini .. and so on!

It becomes real fun this way rather than fiddling with right ascensions 
declinations and things like that at this stage!

As regards book titles, I like books by Patrick Moore and David Levy 
(Skywatching is a very good introduction)
And rather than websites, look in www.softwareseek.com for an astronomy 
program which will simulate the sky at whatever time and location you want!

Hope this helps
Alexei Pace

Malta Astronomical Society
www.geocities.com/maltastro


At 04:48 PM 12/5/99 +0100, you wrote:
>Hello again!
>
>I'm quite new to this list (I subscribed two ago), and I thought, because 
>of the mail from Lew Gramer, I thought I will tell you all a little bit of 
>myself.
>As you may have noticed, my name is Philipp Schmid. I'm 17 years old and 
>I'm interested in space and astronomy since many years. I live in Vienna, 
>Austria (for those you don't know where this is: it's in Europe! If you 
>search it on the map you will find out, that it is right between Germany 
>and Italy. Not very big, but not too small). Now I want to take it more 
>seriosly (watching the sky) than before and I hope I'll get some ideas 
>from your mails. Because I'm quite new, I have got the question if someone 
>of you could give me some ideas for starting exploring the sky. I have got 
>some books, a starmap. The problem is, that when I go outside and try to 
>find some objects, I find them on the map (no problem) but I hardly find 
>them on the sky. Eventually I find them, but I'm not sure then if it is 
>the right object, I was looking for. I hope someone can help me. I mean, 
>someone gave me some book titles (and I'm glad for this) but is there 
>homepage too, where I can find the information? Bokks are so expensive in 
>Austria.
>Thanks, and clera skys to everybody.
>Philipp
>my email: schmidphilipp@hotmail.com
>
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billion human beings have walked the planet Earth." -- arthur c. clarke 
updated1999

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