This is a list of the most famous Astronomical sights in the sky … followed by a longer list of 80 objects which are excellent for viewing with a small telescope.

1. Andromeda Galaxy (M 31).  In a very small telescope, the Andromeda galaxy may not look like much --- just a smudge --- but still, this is the most awesome sight in the sky. Much farther away than anything else visible to our naked eyes, Andromeda is a galaxy of stars separated from everything else we can see in the sky by a void of 2 1/2 million light-years. It's headed straight for us, but it won’t be in our face for about 3 billion years.

2. Moons of Jupiter. Jupiter looks interesting because you can often see the big red spot, the largest visible feature on another world. The four large moons are visible in any telescope (even good binoculars); you can follow their movements on a daily basis, like Galileo did, and ponder the music of the spheres.

3. The rings of Saturn are really just rocks hurtling through cold space --- but from a distance, a dramatic sight. Photo: Randy Brewer

4. Star clusters, held together by gravity, are among the most striking sights in space that you can see without a large scope. There are two kinds: Globular clusters are tightly packed clusters that drift above the plane of our galaxy, the Milky Way, in a halo around the center, and formed early in the history of the galaxy ... some contain black holes. They are round shaped and pretty much look alike, but some are brighter and have more stars.

The 2 brightest globulars, Omega Centauri and 47 Tucanae, are only visible from the Southern Hemisphere.  If you're down there, check 'em out. Otherwise, M 22, M 5, M13, M55, and M3 are about the best ones. The M stands for “Messier,” the French astronomer who listed deep-space objects.

5. Orion Nebula.  It's hard to tell much about a nebula with a small telescope --- it just

looks like a patch of haze or cloud of dust, which is what it is, sort of. High-end telescopes show these objects as giant clouds of (very rarified) gas, heated by photons from nearby stars, with weird shapes and colors caused by starlight filtered through the haze. The Orion Nebula is the brightest nebula. Like the Andromeda galaxy, you can see it with your naked eye on a dark night, if you know where it is and don’t look right at it. In a good telescope, it looks crazy. It is an engine of star formation.

Photo: Randy Brewer

6. Magellanic Clouds. Clouds of stars which lie outside our galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds are for southern eyes only… you can’t see them in Europe or the United States. But they

are awesome sights and important for studying star formation. The Large Magellanic Cloud (right) contains the vast Tarantula Nebula and the site of the most recent nearby supernova, Supernova 1987A.

	7. The Moon is the only thing in space close enough for a small telescope to show a lot of interesting features. Actually, it looks more interesting from here than it does if you're standing on it.  Now that we've been there, we know that. Still an awesome achievement, though. 8. Open clusters. Irregular patches of stars, often beautiful. These are the other kind of star clusters and they all look different. They are cradles of star formation.
The Pleiades (right) is the brightest one, a small but obvious sight which everyone who has been out at night in winter has probably noticed sometime. Open clusters are all over the sky and look interesting in any size telescope. Photo: Royal Observatory, Edinburgh

9.  Double stars are stars that revolve around each other, or around a common point, in a slow dance. Most star systems are actually like that, and ours is the exception. The surprising thing about them is not all stars are the same color. Some of the cooler giant stars (like Betelgeuse and Antares) are obviously reddish, but when you see double stars close together it is easier to notice that all stars have a unique color (due to the surface temperature). Of the dozens of double stars that you might find, one of the best is

Albireo (in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan) --- a small blue-green star next to a larger red one, far enough apart that you can see between them with almost any telescope. Photo: George Lilley

10. Mars. In a small telescope, you can't tell much about the red planet except that it's red (no canals, sorry). Along with Venus, it's the planet that is closest to Earth in size and
	distance. But compared to Earth, both Mars and Venus leave everything to be desired. Especially Venus, the surface heat of which melts even our instruments, so we have few pictures of it. Photo: Jack Schmidling

11. After you check out Albireo, move down the sky a little and look for the Dumbbell Nebula, the brightest example of the planetary nebulas. If you avert your eyes, you can see the ghost-like shape and even subtle colors.  These objects are called “planetary” because they're round, but actually they're clouds of gas formed by a star that exploded.
12.  Eta Carinae and NGC 3372.  For all you Brazilians, Indonesians, Botswanans, Australians, and other southerners, this is one of the best nebulae you can see from Earth. (In America and Europe, you can’t see it.) It's a hot spot formed around a gigantic star called a luminous blue variable, which are the most luminous stars known. This star, Eta Carinae, is four million times as bright as the Sun. Good thing it's not closer to us, or we'd have to wear our sunglasses at night... It will only last a few million years before blowing up (which is a split second in time, compared to the lifespans of other stars; the Sun is 5 billion years old and going strong). In fact, Eta Carinae goes through cycles of blowing up and briefly, about a century ago, became the second brightest star in the sky. 13. Double Cluster. This pair of open star clusters, in Perseus (not visible if you’re way south), is right together in the sky, though not in space --- they were not formed together. It's easy to find with a small scope.
14. Once you get used to the telescope, start looking around and you’ll find things --- clusters, double stars, etc. One of the most interesting parts of the sky to look around in is Scorpius, one of the only constellations which actually looks like something (the Scorpion), and adjacent Sagittarius, another bright constellation which is shaped like a kettle (though it's actually the "Archer"). In Scorpius is Antares, a red giant star, and some star clusters, including the globular cluster M 4. Sagittarius has got more clusters, plus the center of the galaxy, which contains the galaxy's largest black hole (the center isn't really visible, though --- it just looks like a thick patch of the Milky Way). More interesting is the Trifid Nebula (right), with an open cluster next to it. Also visible as a blob in small telescopes is the Lagoon Nebula, with other nebulas such as the Omega Nebula not too far away. There is a lot to look at in Sagittarius. Photo: Matt Bendaniel
15. Variable stars. These stars are sometimes bright, sometimes not. The variation is caused either by changes in the star itself or in some cases, another star orbiting in front of it. The most dramatic one is Mira (Omicron Ceti). One of the brightest stars in its area, it will slowly vanish and come back over about a year’s time. So watching it closely is not too exciting, but the phenomenon of variable stars is interesting and important because the regularity of the variation of one type of variable stars provided a way to establish the absolute brightness of far-away stars, and infer their distances from Earth.

16. Coalsack. If you're south of the Equator (or near it) you’ve seen the Southern Cross, four bright stars that form a cross, and the adjacent dark patch of the sky called the Coalsack. It's a "dark nebula" formed by interstellar dust clouds which don't let any light through from stars on the other side. A nearby attraction in the Cross is a bright open cluster called the "Jewel Box.” If you live in the North, you’re out of luck on this one (along with #8 and #12). At least we've got the Big Dipper.

17. Epsilon Lyrae.  There are a lot of double stars in the sky, but this one is more unusual: it’s a quadruple star (a double-double). It's easy to see with a small scope.

18. Unlike the Pleiades, most open clusters aren't so large that they look obvious to the
eye, but there are dozens of star clusters which look beautiful in any telescope. If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, try to find M 6 and M 7 (in Scorpius), or M 11, M 23, M 34, M 35, M 44, M 41, and various others (depending on time of year).  Down south, check out M 47 and M 93 in Puppis, or NGC 2516 and NGC 3114 in Carina.

19. Stars look bright for different reasons. Two of the three brightest stars in our sky, Sirius and Alpha Centauri, are ordinary stars which look bright to us only because they're in our backyard (under 10 light years from Earth). But the second brightest star in the sky, Canopus (pictured at right), is a blowtorch which would be blinding if it weren’t 300 light-years away. Even more luminous stars are farther off, such as Rigel and Deneb (and even further away, monster stars such as Eta Carinae).
	20. Ring Nebula. Though hard to see with a very low-powered scope, an intermediate one will show this planetary nebula which looks cool --- a smoke ring in space. It was formed by a star which you can see in the middle of the ring. Photo: Jack Schmidling

If you’ve seen all of these, go on to the:

Complete List of 80 Deep-sky Objects For Viewing With a Small Telescope