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Old 29-12-2012, 05:22 PM
LAW (Murphy)
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LAW is offline
 
Join Date: May 2012
Location: Brisbane
Posts: 204
The simplest answer is ... They look like the brightest stars.

The slightly longer answer is ... Jupiter is the bright thing to the North in the evening at the moment, Saturn will rise shortly before the Sun, Venus and Mercury will rise very slightly before the Sun and Mars is very low in the West as the Sun sets.

The longest answer is... using the "Setting Circles" on your mount. If you scope doesn't have a digital hand controller then this will be done manually. One axis will be marked with a 24 hour scale, the other is in degrees. Over the course of a day the sky (actually the earth) will rotate by 24 hours(ish), so Astronomers picked a 'zero' point and gave everything a value relative to that. The degrees measure the deviation from the celestial equator to the North Pole (+Dec) and the South Pole (-Dec). Once the scales on your mount are properly aligned for the night then (theoretically) you can use them to point at anything you know the coordinates of.

I usually just use a free program called Stellarium to find what I want to look at. The program has a feature to take a screenshot in inverted colours (stars are black, page is white) which saves on printer ink and I take that outside and compare the sky with my 'star map' then point the scope at it.

Good luck! Planets are a very rewarding target.
(Definietely get up early and see Saturn, you won't regret it)
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