Tips & Guides
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01
How to Photograph a Meteor Shower
Taking photographs of a meteor shower can be an exercise in patience as meteors streak across the sky quickly and unannounced, but with these tips – and some good fortune – you might be rewarded with a great photo.
The Perseids Meteor Shower. -
02
Binoculars: A Great First Telescope
A first telescope should be easy to use and provide good quality views while being affordable. As it turns out, those requirements make the first telescope of choice for many stargazers something unexpected: a good pair of binoculars!
Observing the Moon with binoculars in Texas, USA. -
03
How to Find Good Places to Stargaze
If you're hoping to do some skywatching, but you're not quite sure how to find a great spot, we have you covered. Here are some key things to know about how to find the best places for stargazing.
The constellation Orion.
Latest Content
Stay up-to-date with the latest skywatching tips and facts from NASA.
Depending on your locale, equinoxes can be seen as harbingers of longer nights and gloomy weather, or promising beacons of nicer temperatures and more sunlight. Observing and predicting equinoxes is one of the earliest skills in humanity’s astronomical toolkit. Many…
Brilliant Venus and a Harvest Moon Use the Moon to find Antares and the Teapot, spot brilliant Venus, welcome the equinox, and see the Harvest Moon near Saturn and Neptune. Skywatching Highlights Transcript The Moon joins a tea party… Venus…
During the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse over Europe, scientists aimed to study a long-standing mystery: why the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, is far hotter than its visible surface. Capturing the data they needed meant being in exactly the right place at the right time. …
On Aug. 12, a total solar eclipse darkened skies over Greenland, Iceland, and Spain. As the Moon covered the Sun, it briefly revealed the Sun’s wispy outer atmosphere — the corona — to those in the path of totality who…
Bird constellations abound in the night sky, including Cygnus, the majestic swan. Easy to find with its dazzling stars, it is one of the few constellations that look like its namesake, and it is full of treasures. Visible in the…
