Use binoculars for an Easter star-cluster hunt

  • By Mike Lynch
  • Friday, March 25, 2016 11:10am
  • Life

A traditional Easter egg hunt is a lot of fun, especially for kids. It’s also a lot of fun to roll across starry night skies with a pair of binoculars. Telescopes can certainly let you see heavenly bodies with more magnification, but a pair of binoculars lets you see wider areas of the sky in a single view.

You don’t have to have a super-duper large pair of binoculars for stargazing. In fact, it’s much better to have a smaller pair that you can hold up while you’re sitting back in a lawn chair.

I advise newcomers to stargazing to get to know their way around the stars and constellations with both their bare eyes and binoculars before buying a telescope.

One of the best celestial treats you will run into when you scan your binoculars across the night sky are star clusters, made up of mainly young stars, generally less than 100 million years old, which is considered grossly under age compared to the rest of the more mature stars like our sun, which is celebrating around 5 billion years of stellar life.

You can start your binocular browsing from any point in the heavens, making sure to pan slowly across the sky so you don’t miss anything. I’d like to propose a good starting point right now, the Pleiades star cluster, also known as the “Seven Little Sisters.” You can easily see the Pleiades at nightfall with your naked eyes in the low western sky. It really resembles a tiny little dipper but it’s nowhere near the actual Little Dipper. It’s a classic open cluster of young stars not much more than 100 million years old, lying a little more than 400 light-years away with just one light-year clocking in at nearly 6 trillion miles. The Pleiades are fabulous through binoculars. In fact, I think they’re better looking through binoculars than a telescope. Make sure you take long continual stares through your binoculars at the Pleiades or any cluster. The longer you look the more you’ll see as your eyes get adjusted to the light level in your binoculars.

Not too far away from the Pleiades in the low northwestern sky, you can find another celestial Easter egg, or actually a pair of eggs. It’s the Double Cluster of Perseus. Look for the very easy-to-see constellation Cassiopeia the Queen. It’s as bright as the Big Dipper and resembles a sideways W.

To the right of the W, you’ll many stars — the Double Cluster lies in the plane and one of thickest parts of our Milky Way galaxy. The two side by side, nearly identical clusters are really far away at around 7,000 light-years distant.

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