Will I be able to see anything?

[Mooches]

Hello from Kolkata, India. I want to get into the astronomy hobby and was wondering.. where I live, on a clear night, when I'm out on the streets, with just my eyes I can see a clear moon and just a couple stars. So I can't see much with the naked eye. Is it because of light pollution or what? I wanted to buy a 10x50 binocs and a telescope later on, but don't want to rush into it before being sure that I'll be able to see something. Any advice, thanks.

[swamp thing]

Hi

Firstly welcome to the forum.

Righty ho! Personally I'm not familiar with Kolkata as I've not visited India but a quick google tells me it's a huge city, with serious haze, smog, and air pollution issues. This would seem to be your biggest problem as regards any sort of observing. Is there any way you could get transport out of the city to observe, as this would be a huge benefit?

[Qualia]

Ay, in my experience, if you can't see the stars there's probably either a lot of light pollution (LP) - the yellow-burning hue one sees burning over a city from afar - or light glare (having a direct light entering your eye and thus blocking out vision of the stars). If the latter you can try constructing some kind of shied, if the former, there's not a lot you can do and the best bet is to move away from the city.

There are two easy ways to see how affected you are with LP: download Stellarium go into Sky and Viewing options and play around with what stars you can see with the naked eye by adjusting the light pollution tag. Or, allow your eyes to adjust to the night, find Polaris and then Ursa Minor and observe what stars of Ursa Minor you can see. This will give you a rough guide to naked eye limitation.

To do serious stargazing you want this to be as high a number as possible, but with that said, with my small 4" in a city with a general naked eye star magnitude of about 3 to 4, you can have a great time out. Planets, Lunar and Solar observations are a joy to observe, you can split stars and gaze upon open clusters. What will be tricky are galaxies and other such faints DSOs. The best bet, however, is to try to find a dark site near where you live. I have found one this week which is only 30 minutes away from the city on the edge of a huge desert and I have a star magnitude here of about 5 with ease!

Hope this helps.