Two years, one second-hand telescope, and four things I can find reliably. In order, starting from knowing nothing.
4 parts
The telescope cost sixty pounds from someone clearing out a garage and it is, by every account I have read, not very good.
It is also the reason I know anything. A better one would have sat in a cupboard because I would have been precious about it. The whole value of a cheap instrument is that you take it outside on a marginal night and do not mind if it is…
Walked forty minutes out of town to get away from the streetlights and it made almost no difference, which is its own kind of information.
The glow comes from everywhere at once, a dome of it, and walking out from under a dome requires a rather longer walk than forty minutes. I knew this. Reading it and standing under it are different.…
Rules for the night walk, arrived at over two years:
No headphones. The whole point is that it is quiet and you can hear the quiet.
A route you know, so you are not navigating.
Phone in the pocket, on, unlooked at.
Turn around when you want…
Things I can reliably find: Orion, the Plough, Cassiopeia, and Jupiter when it is behaving. Two years, and that is the list.
Everybody starting out expects the sky to resolve into a map. It does not. It resolves into four or five anchors and an enormous amount of context-dependent guessing, and the guessing gets slightly better every clear night, of which…