Field notes
Plain reference pages for naked-eye and binocular observing — when the meteor showers peak, which planets are up, and how to tell a good night from a wasted one before you carry a chair outside.
The three things worth checking before you plan an evening.
see the table Peaks last a night or two. The table on the meteor page lists all nine annual showers worth a late evening.
29.5 d One synodic month. Anything fainter than a bright planet is lost within four days of full Moon, so plan faint targets near new Moon.
25 min How long the eye needs to reach useful sensitivity. One glance at a phone screen resets most of it — use red light if you need to read a chart.
Four pages, no accounts, no newsletter. Read what you need and close the tab.
Peak dates, typical rates under a dark sky, parent bodies, and the hours each radiant is usefully high.
What five naked-eye planets actually look like, how bright they get, and why Mars is only worth the trouble every other year.
Seeing versus transparency, averted vision, why binoculars beat a cheap telescope, and reading a light-pollution map.
What this site is, where the numbers come from, and how to send a correction.
Short entries, added when something is worth writing down.
A night can be steady enough to split a close double star and still be too hazy to show the Milky Way. The two qualities come from different layers of the atmosphere, and they rarely peak together.
Two hours after midnight, radiant high, no Moon: 41 meteors, of which six left visible trains. Well short of the quoted hourly rate, which is exactly what the quoted rate means.
Opposition comes roughly every 26 months, and the apparent disc swings between about 4 and 25 arcseconds. Outside a good opposition window, it is an orange dot and nothing more.
They cost less than a department-store telescope, weigh little, need no setup, and show more deep-sky objects than most beginners ever find with a wobbly mount.