Hello, and new to Astronomy

[flyboyprowler]

Hi, I am recently retired, and lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the south east corner of Spain. My wife bought me a very nice telescope and lenses, and we have near perfect viewing conditions at our house. Trouble is I don't know what I am looking for, or at, and have tried to find, for starters, a Planisphere for my area, approx 32 degrees north. Can anyone help me get started? Many thanks, Ainsley

[Demonperformer]

A program that comes highly recommended is "Stellarium" - free to download off the internet

And welcome to the forum, by the way. We will all envy your skies.

[BAZ Senior]

Hi Ainsley, welcome to SGL.

[Astro_Baby]

HI and welcome from me too

[Euan]

Hi Ainsley and welcome

As DP said, Stellarium is a good starting point. You can put in your location so it will show you exactly what you can expect to see and where

[Rusty Strings]

Hi Ainsley and welcome to SGL

[phillc]

Hello Ainsley and a warm welcome to SGL.

phillc

[david o]

Hello Ainsley,

A very warm welcome to the forum.

Others have said it, Stellarium is a very good planetarium program.

As to planispheres for your latitude there's this at Amazon: The Night Sky 30°-40°.

Or go the DIY route with Taki's Double-sided Planisphere, there's a whole range of latitudes to choose from. You should also check out his other star atlases.

[Rui]

Hi Ainsley. Welcome to SGL.

Southern Spain is a nice place to spend some time skygazing. Much much better than UK.

You should contact a local astronomy association. Here goes a link to a directory of all the amateur astronomy clubs in Spain: Asociaciones Astronómicas

[OzDave]

Hi there and welcome to SGL!

I have started in this hobby recently myself and found that a good start was to firstly just look at the sky and try to figure out what the brightest stars were according to a star map. After a few nights of doing this, it quickly became fairly easy to find my way around the "bright stuff" and where to look for planets and so forth.

Then the other thing I did was to read up about things like the Celestial Sphere and how equatorial and alt-azimuth coordinate systems work and how this all relates to the sky.

I have a GoTo computer controlled mount, but I found that just telling it point at something wasn't that interesting and so I started to learn how to locate dimmer objects that you can't see with the naked eye by hopping from star to star through the telescope until reaching the intended object.

I started all this about 6 months ago and learning to do these things has been a good set of stepping stones I think.

Good luck and I hope to hear some of your tales on SGL!

Regards,

David