Reaching for the Stars The Sky at Night

Good evening, and first of all, a very happy New Year.

Have you had a new telescope for Christmas

or are you going to get one?

I'd like to give you a few tips on how to set it up and how to use it.

So for the moment, out to the garden.

Well, happy New Year to you and let's hope we get some better

clear weather this year.

It certainly couldn't be any worse than it was last year!

This programme's about your first telescope.

Perhaps you had a new one for Christmas.

Getting your first telescope can be really, really exciting

and it can literally open up a whole new world of astronomy for you.

It can also be rather daunting so we're going to present some

simple tips on how to get set up and how to get started.

And crucially, we'll try

and pick out a few objects that you can look at for the first time.

Over the years on The Sky At Night, Patrick always tried to steer us

on which telescopes we should get and what to use them for.

As you can see, we are doing this programme from my home in Selsey

where I've got an old thatched house within sound of the sea.

In the garden, I've set up my two telescopes,

the big ones -

a reflector inside a run-off shed and another one inside a dome.

It's from here that I carry out my own observational work.

His telescopes were for the advanced astronomer,

but he also had lots of advice for the beginner.

I'd like to begin by showing you my own first telescope.

Here it is.

It's a three inch refractor, and I had it when I was a boy of 11,

and that goes back to 1934.

It wasn't new then. I think it must have been built around 1910.

I called it a three inch refractor

because it collects its light with a lens, or object-glass,

three inches across.

I am very refractor minded.

They give lovely, crisp images and of course, I am essentially,

an observer of the moon and planets so I like refractors,

but if you're more interested in star clusters, nebulae

and what they call deep sky work, I think the reflector is better.

That advice is still good today.

We have invited along some newcomers to astronomy who have all acquired

a new telescope in the past year but are finding them a challenge.

Danni Rochman has come from London and works in children's publishing.

Danni is struggling to get her telescope aligned,

something I'm sure we can help fix.

I'd really like to learn my way around the sky a bit better.

I've had my telescope for the best part of a year but the weather

and living in London means I don't get to get it out very often.

I'd like to see a galaxy through my scope.

I've never seen any nebulae.

So that would be something I'd like to look out for tonight.

Stephen and Peta Bosley are both retired

and bought their telescope earlier this year.

Unfortunately, it's still so new, it's in the box it arrived in.

I want to get the beast out of the box.

I want to get it set up on its tripod,

I want to point it at the sky

and I want to be able to know I'm looking at the right things

and just plain enjoy it.

I absolutely agree. There are so many wonderful things there to see.

I'd love to show our grandkids the marvels of the universe.

Derek has had his telescope for six months and whilst it now

lives in a golf bag, it's yet to see some proper action.

I'd like to learn how to use the scope.

I bought it because I've always been a little bit interested,

but how do I use it? I don't know...yet.

Finally, we have Julia Gosling who has managed to leave

her two young kids with her partner

and brought her telescope along for us to look at.

I'd really like to get to grips with using it properly

and understand it a bit better.

New technology means there's a whole range of telescopes on the market

so let's see what everyone has brought.

It's going to be a surprise for all of us.

So this looks like a tripod.

-It does come out. It went in!

-There we go.

Some of the telescopes cost around £300 while others are nearer 1,000.

-That's the scope itself.

-OK.

One thing I notice is we've done something slightly wrong to start with.

We've got the eyepiece pointing downwards, so let's spin it around.

So we do that with it. And there's the lens cap falling off.

These telescopes all have a computerised GoTo mount.

When set up correctly, the telescope should take you to any object

you want to see in the night sky.

There we go.

First, we have to assemble the telescopes.

For the first few times, it can be fiddly, but there is a lot

you can do in the daylight which makes things much easier.

Once you've done it a couple of times,

do you find you sort of know the routine?

Once I've done it a couple times, I find I like to keep it together!

That's why I have mine set up, because what actually happens is

you get half an hour to set up and then the clouds come in!

-Do you find it easy to set up?

-Um, at times.

Yes, it really is quite easy once you've done it once

and had someone supervise you doing it.

I'm still not wonderful at aligning it.

-Do you find it difficult to find things in the sky?

-Yes, definitely.

-That's still a big problem for me.

-Right.

But it's just about a one-woman job to set it up.

It's rather good, isn't it?

So this is the bit that attaches to the telescope

and this has all the motors in it.

So we place that on there.

Right, now the most important bit - the tube itself.

I think the thing which is quite misleading

with a scope like this is that it looks like a small telescope

but in fact, it isn't really that small

because it is equivalent to a telescope much longer...

Yes.

..and that means that the focal length of it -

that's the number which is on the side here.

You see that number? "F = 1,500."

That means it's got a focal length of one and a half metres.

So it's actually equivalent to a one and a half metre long telescope.

-That will make things difficult for you to find.

-Yes!

Which is probably why I've been having so many problems.

So the other thing you have here, for this telescope to work,

is an eyepiece.

The different eyepieces magnify different amounts so we have,

for example here, a 25mm eyepiece.

That's what we call a low power eyepiece.

-It has a longer focal length.

-Right.

That's the best one to start with so we can put that in. There we go.

Right, OK.

The best thing to do when you're starting is start off with your wide-angle lens.

You get your object in the view.

If you want a more zoomed-in view, this eyepiece in here

is a 10mm eyepiece so it's got a shorter focal length

and that means it will actually give you a higher magnification.

-Right.

-This is what we call a finder scope.

It's basically a little telescope and all it does is slide onto here.

You can now use that to line up the telescope on the lamp down there.

Right, OK, let's have a look.

-I can see a building. I think I'm on that building.

-OK.

So...it must be that one.

Ah, there it is.

-You've got it?

-Yeah.

-OK.

Well, we're roughly lined up there, so if we look to the telescope,

what can we see?

Do you know what I can see? I can see a tree.

-Oh, no!

-Yes.

-It's not lined up.

So that shows it's not lined up at all.

So basically, do you want me to move that round so we're looking up?

-Yes.

-So if we go... up and then across...

Oh, yes.

Now, if you look through there...

-It's not quite in focus but you can see the lamp.

-Yes, that's it.

-OK, if you look through the finder again, is that way off?

-Yes.

So if you adjust the finder so the lamp comes into view

and it's in the crosshairs...

I can't get it. Oh, there we go.

..then it becomes second nature.

-Have you got it?

-Just about.

So we've got, more or less, the middle of the lamp there.

We now know that that is lined up with that

so when the sky goes dark tonight, if you get something in there

-then theoretically, it should be lined up with that as well.

-Yes.

So we can give that a try later on tonight.

Well, guys, we've got a few other guest telescopes here.

-It's a nice array actually.

-An impressive array, yes.

We should talk about our first telescopes and what we got started.

This is yours, is it?

This isn't actually my first telescope, it's my second telescope.

You've upgraded, then!

Well, my wife saw this in a charity shop for £20

so I'm not sure how it got there.

My guess is that someone got it for Christmas or a birthday

and in the end, didn't know what to do with it.

The biggest problem with the telescope like that is the mount

because you only have to touch it and it wobbles like a jelly,

and the problem is if that gives somebody a bad experience

when they're trying to move the telescope or trying

to view something and the telescope's moving around,

they get fed up with that and it ends up in a charity shop.

I don't have my first telescope here but we have brought Patrick's out

and Patrick's is a lovely brass refractor.

Is one of the simplest forms of telescopes you can get.

It's got a primary lens at the top and an eyepiece at the bottom

and the light is magnified in a very simple way.

I believe he bought that for seven pounds and ten shillings!

That was in the 1930s, I think.

So in today's money that's a little over £100.

Which is quite a good buy. It's on a good tripod, as well.

But now, Pete, we come to this.

Why don't you tell everybody what this is?

I saw that and I thought he'd been catching lobsters

because it doesn't look like it catches photons to me!

You are just so rude about stuff!

My first ever telescope was actually a 40mm refractor

so that's quite a small refracting telescope

but I really wanted to go bigger and I couldn't afford it

so at the end of the day, I decided to make my own.

So basically, I ground my own mirror

which was an eight and three-quarter inch mirror

so it's quite a big telescope, but I had to get the tube from somewhere,

and somebody was throwing out a galvanised steel fence,

and this is all that's left of it, and it is built like a tank.

-Is that satisfying?

-That was incredibly satisfying.

So your first proper view of the planets

and the universe was with a home-grown optics that you'd done.

And it worked brilliantly.

I think the first deep sky object I ever saw through that telescope

was the Ring Nebula.

Hopefully, we'll be able to show our newcomers some interesting stuff later on.

It does look like it's going to clear, doesn't it? What do you think?

Do that optimistic thing you do when we're camping.

-It's awful when you say it's going to clear.

-I think it's going to be fine!

-There you go!

-Oh, we might as well go in now!

Well, let's hope for the clear skies later.

Patrick's garden has always been a great location for a star party.

There's a real feeling of anticipation

and excitement as darkness approaches.

Over the years, Patrick has hosted some great star parties here

and we've been lucky with the weather.

The transit of Venus in 2004 was an amazing event with astronomers

flocking to Farthings to share this unique experience with Patrick.

And we're about to see something that no-one now living has ever seen

so let's hope the sky stays clear.

But Patrick has not always been lucky with the weather.

His live show for the 50th programme of The Sky At Night put him off

observing on live TV for some time.

I can't see one single star. Can you, George? Any luck?

No, I must be able to see it before I can get onto it.

That's the trouble, of course.

There is the moon, I can see it for the moment. No, it's gone again.

It's gone.

Yes, and there is Saturn for the first time on direct television.

Has it gone? Oh, no!

Just as I got it on the crosswires, it blacked right out.

How absolutely typical, there's nothing we can do about it.

I can't move a 24 inch telescope quicker than that.

No, I'm afraid you can't.

Let's hope we're a bit luckier with the weather tonight.

Back in Patrick's garden, we are waiting to show everyone

how to use their telescopes

but the skies have been teasing us with clouds.

Finally, it clears and Paul has got all excited.

The sky is really delivering for us now and on Jupiter,

there's something rather special tonight.

-Can you make out the Great Red Spot?

-Yes, I can. It's amazing!

It's absolutely the best view I've ever had.

And to think that that spot is three times the size of the Earth,

you can see just how large Jupiter is compared to the Earth.

Once you been looking at Jupiter for a while,

the colours are quite spectacular.

-Are you finding any colour there?

-Yes, definitely.

You know, with my telescope, which is smaller, I don't see colour,

so this is wonderful.

I've never seen this much detail.

The advantage of a computerised GoTo mount is that you can find

faint objects in the sky quickly and easily.

But setting up the telescope needs to be precise.

So the first task -

we have to make sure the telescope is aligned with the sky.

To do that, we pick out some bright stars

and check the telescope is looking at them.

I've come to give Derek a hand and we've chosen Deneb

in the constellation of Cygnus as our first bright star.

So we're nearly pointing up at Deneb

so if you point up towards Deneb up there,

you can see a very bright star.

-So that's Deneb. Is it right in the centre?

-It is.

So, on the paddle, we're going to align.

Do you have the time on you?

9.16.

It says "brightest star" or "two star align"

so we'll do two star align.

and then we choose a second star.

So let's pick...

We want something as far away from Deneb as we can.

Which is...

Now, ideally, there's Aldebaran up near Jupiter.

So I reckon we spin all the way around and try and find that.

It looks like it's trying to guess where Aldebaran is.

So because we've given it one star and it knows where it is

and what time it is, it can get a good guess of where it is.

What it does is it slews over really quickly

-and the beep says it's aligned.

-OK.

So, let's see if we're anywhere...

How does that look?

Does that look like a bright star to you?

-Yes, it does.

-Yes?

Then we've got to hit enter.

"Alignment successful."

-Hooray, it works.

-Now we test it.

So, pick something we want to try and find.

Is that the Square of Pegasus?

That is the Square of Pegasus, so shall we try and see

if it will find us the Andromeda galaxy?

-That sounds interesting.

-Yes?

-Yes.

So, Messier Catalogue, 31.

-Yes, please.

-And in theory...

-It's going in the right direction.

It's going in the right direction.

I tried this with a GoTo mount that I borrowed from work once

and I tried to point it at something

and it tried to go below the horizon so I knew my alignment had failed.

So let's hope this goes to the right place.

It's beeped.

Now, here's the test. Here's the test.

-Let's see...

-Is there's anything in there?

Ah, it's in the viewfinder.

If we look through the main scope is there anything there?

It might just be that our finder's not aligned. Is there a fuzzy patch?

-It's right smack in the middle.

-Is it?

-Near enough, yes.

-Oh, excellent.

-Very fuzzy. Look at that. That is a very good shot, look.

Yes, that's definitely the Andromeda galaxy. There you go.

The sky, as they say now, Derek, is your oyster.

I will hand over the paddle to you and you can pick anything you want

-in the sky and in theory, your telescope will...

-Find it.

-..find it.

-Absolutely, that's great stuff.

The Reverend Graham Smith has joined us in the garden.

He confessed he's having some difficulties with his new telescope.

Let's see if we can show him the heavens.

Is the GoTo working?

I think, for the first time ever, I've got it going, yes.

I give you a round of applause, it's very impressive.

Why don't you give us a little demonstration, then?

Could we find the planet Uranus?

Well, we shall try.

Let's hope it goes in the right direction.

-There's something rather magical about this, isn't there?

-Yes!

Can I have a look?

No, I think you might be slightly off-kilter.

It all depends on whether I recognise the stars

I was aligning on correctly, of course.

It seems that Graham's telescope isn't set up properly

and we need to realign it.

There are a number of bright stars we can choose

depending on the time of year and what's visible.

The winter constellation of Orion is high in our night sky.

It has Betelgeuse and Rigel,

both ideal for aligning the telescope.

It gets easier every time you do it.

Danni wants to learn how to find objects by star hopping

so we are switching off the sky sat-nav and I am helping her to find

her first galaxy - M31 or the Andromeda galaxy.

-Right, that should be it.

-OK.

Let's see.

Oh, oh, nearly!

Oh, look at that!

I can hear the excitement now

as Danni finds deep sky objects on her own.

Not quite on my own!

With the Andromeda galaxy,

what you see is just the core of the galaxy.

You can't actually see the spiral arms and things which you see in beautiful photographs of it.

That's wonderful...having never seen a galaxy through my scope before.

-Is that your first galaxy?

-Yes.

-Wow.

It's tricky to find, but I got there.

And it gets easier every time you do it.

You learn that pattern of stars and you'll remember how tricky it was.

-Yes!

-And it will get a lot easier.

So after a few mis-starts, we finally realigned the telescope.

-We've done quite a good job, haven't we, Graham?

-Yes, I think so.

It's asked for a couple of bright stars so we did Rigel in Orion

and Capella in Auriga.

We got it to find Jupiter, which is good,

so now we'll try and find Uranus.

Do you want to press the button and send it on its way?

-Have you ever seen Uranus before?

-No, no.

It should be immediately obvious. It will be an emerald green object.

-Got it?

-Yes.

-Can you make out the green colour?

-Just, yes.

It's quite impressive, isn't it?

It is, and I didn't think you'd see something that far away with this.

Right out in the icy depths of the solar system,

it's probably warmer there than it is here tonight!

-It is quite impressive, isn't it?

-Amazing.

And actually, the scope found it,

which I've not been able to do before.

Congratulations, you have a working telescope

and a wonderful view of the outer solar system.

-So, Steve, Peta, I know you've just got your telescope aligned.

-We have.

Do you fancy a test to try and find something off the Moore Winter Marathon?

-That would be great.

-Absolutely.

OK, so how do you reckon to the Owl Cluster, NGC 467?

Never seen it so...

-So, that would be good.

-Right.

January is a great month for stargazing.

The nights are long and the weather can be more favourable.

It's also the last month of our Moore Winter Marathon.

You can still take part. The closing date is the end of January.

For details see our website.

Julia, we've got a very simple telescope here.

-Do you like how simple it is?

-It's very simple.

-It might be simple enough for me.

-It's got no GoTo mount.

It's not even got a viewfinder cos Chris left it at home.

I've set it up to look at the Pleiades star cluster.

Are you familiar with Pleiades?

-I call it the little shopping trolley.

-Ha, that's brilliant!

The little shopping trolley, it is. It is quite impressive.

-Even a telescope that size.

-Oh, yes, it's very pretty.

An object like this is better in a telescope this size

because it's a lot smaller.

If you use a bigger telescope,

the whole thing gets magnified much more

so a small telescope is better for something like this.

What colour stars do you see?

Properly one of the brightest ones, towards the top of the view,

is quite blue.

Yeah. They're beautiful things, aren't they?

-Yes, it's very bright like little jewels.

-Little jewels!

Your shopping trolley full of little jewels!

A telescope this size is sort of a good beginners' one, I think.

It's easy to handle.

Yes, and also, you can pick the whole thing up, move it,

and actually, quite quickly, get into position and do something else.

You haven't got to fiddle about with too much setup, have you?

No, that's right. It is very accessible, isn't it?

You are up and ready to go.

Danni is trying to find M35,

the lovely star cluster in the constellation

of Gemini The Twins.

Oh, there we go, yes.

-You've got the two stars?

-I think I do. Do you want to check?

Yes, yes, sure.

Yes, you've definitely got them.

-Now you need the scope to go up and slightly round to the right.

-OK.

-What am I looking for?

-It's a little cluster. Like a little hazy patch.

Oh, goodness, yes. OK, now I know what I was looking for.

That's fantastic, yes.

-Lots and lots of stars.

-Yes, lots of stars.

When you finally see it,

you realise what you should have been looking for, it's obvious.

That's part of the thrill of sort of hunting things down yourself

because when you see it, you get really excited.

That's brilliant, thank you very much. That's a pleasure.

-Has this been a good evening for you?

-It's been a fantastic evening.

The chill's beginning to set in now but it's been really fantastic

and I do feel a lot more confident even just after one evening

of being told how to find each object

and what to look for and how to direct myself to it.

-So it's not going to go back in its box.

-It's not.....

-No, no! It will come out again very soon, definitely.

-Brilliant.

-Thank you very much.

-No problem at all.

Right, Derek, how's it going at the end of the night?

It's been really good, great.

I've got a nice view at the moment of the Crab Nebula...

-Oh, wow.

-..which is just visible.

So you're starting on the Moore Winter Marathon.

-Well, apparently so!

-Excellent. Well, that's number 26.

So Peta, early on when we started,

you said you wanted to get the beast out of the box

and wanted to master it.

Do you feel you've accomplished that this evening?

The beast is definitely out of the box.

I've been involved with setting it up.

I feel I've got a lot further than I have before.

You feel you can build on that and go on to master the thing?

Absolutely.

Jupiter was the best view, I think.

It was really amazing and I did make the mistake of looking down

a telescope that's much bigger than mine.

How beautiful it looked in it.

It's definitely going to make me

get the telescope out a bit more often next year.

It's been great, actually, to see people get started

and the best thing was seeing people make mistakes because it is hard when you make a start.

-Of course it is.

-And then getting them sorted out, persevering.

-We all made mistakes when we started out.

-I'm still doing it now!

We're fairly competent now, but we did make mistakes.

But it was also interesting to see how excited they were

when they were overcoming those mistakes and solving them.

And seeing some objects for the first time as well.

People seeing either the planet Uranus or the Crab Nebula

or whatever they were looking at for the first time was brilliant.

We've been looking at a few planets in our solar system.

Over the past year there's been a lot of stories about planets

and other solar systems - some very exciting news.

Chris Lintott's been finding out more.

The astonishing discovery late last year of a rocky,

Earth-sized planet rocked astronomy.

It's orbiting a star called Alpha Centauri B

in our nearest star system

and at just four light years away,

it's almost imaginable that man could one day journey there.

Science fiction may just be transforming into science fact.

The planet, rather unfortunately dubbed Alpha Centauri BB,

sits in a three star system comprising a faint red star

and two brighter stars, all bouncing a gravitational tango.

The planet is right in the middle of that dance orbiting

one of the brightest stars.

Lewis Dartnell is an astrobiologist

and speculates about life in other worlds.

He joined me to talk about the planet and the system it lives in.

Now, this planet is on a very, very tight orbit around its host star.

It orbits what's quite similar to the sun.

It's roughly sun-like, Alpha Centauri B,

and it orbits about ten times closer to its star than even Mercury does.

-So it must be very hot.

-So it's exceedingly hot.

Well over 1,000 degrees on its surface

so it wouldn't really be a rocky world in that sense.

It would be a kind of magma or lava ocean world.

So no hope for life on this world

but what is very promising and exciting about this

is that from the Kepler space telescope we now know that terrestrial rocky planets

tend to form as part of families of clusters.

In the same way as you'd have several puppies in a litter,

we'd have several puppies or planets in the litter around its star.

-So where we find one rocky planet...

-We'd expect to find others.

So the race is now on to look for planets that are a lot more like the Earth -

they're orbiting further away,

that aren't scorchingly or rock-meltingly hot

that are in what's known as the habitable zone.

-The Goldilocks Zone.

-Yes, not too hot, not too cold, just right.

-Just right for liquid water.

-This is the interesting point, isn't it?

Every time we find one of these weird worlds,

one of these strange systems, it tells us something about how planets form

and that's what we're trying to understand here,

and understand how unusual our solar system is.

It's also that every time we try to make some general,

sweeping statement about "this is how planetary systems are,"

we find a counter example almost as if on cue,

to get everyone thinking again about how the things we work.

The list goes on. We have seven planets around double stars,

so not orbiting individual stars but orbiting both stars, like this.

We have one planet around four stars just to make things more complicated.

Let's come back to Alpha Centauri BB.

There's a planetary system four light years away.

We've got to go there, surely.

It's on our doorstep.

It's invitingly close, tantalisingly close,

and in astronomical terms, it is our next door neighbour.

It's the closest star system to the sun.

In practical terms, in real terms, on a human scale,

it's so far away - four light years.

The fastest spacecraft we've built yet, would take tens of thousand years to get there.

What would we get from such a trip?

Presumably, we'd fly through the system.

-Stopping is going to be hard when we get there.

-Yes.

What would you get? You're a planetary scientist.

What would you see of the systems?

You do a flyby mission in exactly the same way

as the earliest missions to other planets launched from Earth

were all flyby missions,

but it would be a close-up view of another world,

another solar system, and that would tell so much information

about another example, which we can then compare.

If we start doing comparative solar system studies

between Alpha Centauri Alpha Centauri BB or any other planets we discover there,

and Earth or Venus or Mercury.

It's just another way of finding out as much as we can

about ourselves by comparing and contrasting against other examples.

This is the best shot, so let's hope we head off soon. Lewis, thank you.

Thank you.

When Patrick presented the first Sky At Night in 1957,

space travel of any sort was science fiction.

So who knows, in the next 55 years,

a voyage to Alpha Centauri B might just come about.

If you look up into the sky on any dark night, you will see

thousands of stars and all these stars are suns in their own right.

Of course, they are much too hot to land on but many of them

may have other planets going around, other Earths if you like.

I'm sure they have and I'm also sure that many of these other Earths

are inhabited.

Some by people who know as much as we do,

and others by races who know a great deal more.

If we're ever going to contact those other civilisations which must exist,

it's got to be done, I think, by some methods about which

we know absolutely nothing at the present moment.

And I suspect we're just about as far away from that kind of thing

as King Canute was from television.

But some things never change.

For more than half a century, Patrick encouraged us

simply to look up at the night skies and to wonder.

That pleasure is still there for all to enjoy as we, like Patrick,

reach for the stars.

Next month, we'll be talking about the sun and those lovely things -

the moon and the Southern lights.

Until then, goodnight.

Venus, goodbye.

Goodbye, Venus and thank you.

Well, that was absolutely great.

And so from Scotland, at the end of our annual eclipse, for the moment, good night.

I think it's not too early,

I hope, to wish you a very happy Christmas, New Year and clear skies.

Goodnight.

Well, we told you it was like science fiction, goodnight.

And for now, goodnight.

Is Mars a dead world or is it a world

where there are things which live and grow?

Goodnight.

And so from Brighton, where the sky is now completely overcast,

goodnight.

Goodnight.

Goodnight.

If you have got any kind of telescope, well, have a look

at the Pleiades and you'll be astonished at the richness of it.

Even a small telescope will give you a superb view

of this magnificent cluster of suns.

Goodnight.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd