Try stargazing wherever you are

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/apr/11/try-stargazing-wherever-you-are-astronomy

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The first "wow" moment of my stargazing adventure took place before I had even looked through a telescope. Staring up at the cloudy night sky one cold March evening, I spotted a bright pinprick of light to the south-west. "Which star is that?" I asked Seb Jay, the astronomer who was going to teach me to stargaze and who was, at that moment, busy setting up a pair of telescopes in my back garden.

Seb looked over his shoulder. "That's not a star," he said. "It's Jupiter."

To begin stargazing, all you have to do is look up. This is obvious, I know, but I had long assumed that, outside the darkest of dark countryside, there was no point looking for stars. The middle of a light-polluted city, I had thought, was not the place from which to survey the heavens. I was wrong.

A gasp of realisation is often the first thing Seb hears when he stargazes with someone. He brings telescopes to people's houses and takes them on a tour of the sky. The night he came to my house, he began by pointing out some of the major constellations that we could see without any help from telescopes. To the east was Ursa Major, the Great Bear. The seven brightest stars in this constellation make up the Plough and the two stars on the edge point up in a line towards Polaris, the north star.

Within minutes, I was having visions of being able to navigate in unfamiliar lands using this simple and profoundly useful information.

As soon as the telescopes were set up (reflecting telescopes with 12-inch and 8-inch main mirrors), I look through them at Jupiter. Through the telescope, the gas giant planet was a perfect white circle of light, with dark bands at the top and bottom. Stretched out on either side, in a perfect straight line, were four tiny spots – Jupiter's biggest moons: Io, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, first spotted by Galileo in 1610.

The local arm of the Milky Way was off to the west, though we could not see much of it from our location. In truly dark areas, the Milky Way looks like is a haze of light that, the closer you look, resolves to an almost-uncountable number of individual stars, the closer you look. To the east, we could look outside our galaxy, off into deep space and the vast Virgo supercluster – a collection of galaxies, including our own. Here, all the spots of distant light are whole galaxies, and even the closest of them is hundreds of thousands of light years away.

In one night it is possible to observe the lifecycle of stars. The Orion nebula is a stellar nursery, where stars ignite. Nearby, it seems, are the 100m-year-old stars of the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters. In the Beehive cluster, around 500 light years away in the constellation of Cancer, the stars are 600m years old and huge, up to 20 times the size of our sun.

My first memory of stargazing is watching the moon with my dad. He was brought up in rural Nigeria, which had great views of the night sky. He was fascinated by science, and after he moved to London he would take me for walks in Finsbury Park. As the evening came, we would watch the glorious full moon rise. That – and watching The Clangers on TV – was the beginning of my fascination with the stars. Maggie Aderin-Pocock, presenter of The Sky at Night

By the time the faint red dot of Mars appeared over the horizon, to the south, it was getting close to midnight and time to pack up – which was a shame because, Seb told me, it would only be a few more hours before Saturn made its appearance above the horizon, magnificent rings and all. Never mind seeing Jupiter with the naked eye: Seb says that the tiny image of Saturn through a telescope is the image that takes most new stargazers' breath away.

I asked Seb for his thoughts on why, given the extreme detail and quality of images we can now get so easily from Nasa and its space observatories, people still want to stand, shivering, in gardens and fields all over the country, squinting through telescopes at tiny patches of light. His answer was that there was something special about seeing stars with your own eyes, knowing that the images had not been manipulated or enhanced in any way.

But I think there's something else going on. Looking at a star or planet in the night sky might give you far less detail than the dramatic images from the Hubble space telescope but, instead, you are getting to physically connect with those objects.

The photons from the stars you are looking at were created before any humans existed on Earth – often, in fact, before the Earth itself existed. These particles of light have travelled across billions of miles, sometimes for billions of years, through space.

At the moment you "see" the star, these ancient photons are being absorbed by your eyes and, in a very real sense, you have touched that ancient, faraway object. You can't get that from a photograph.

Special offer and competition

Stargazing experienceSeb Jay's company, Dark Sky Telescope Hire, is offering Do Something readers 10% off bookings made to 31 August 2014. Ring 07884 001815 or fill out the booking form online.

Win a telescope!For your chance to win one of four telescopes, visit the Guardian competition page. The first prize is a 76x700 Zennox telescope worth £69.99. Three runnersup will win our 50x600 model worth £34.99. The competition closes on 31 May 2014