Don Pensack: Hi this is Don Pensack with Scope city once again and today we are talking about how to select and use a telescope? This topic will be "What you can see in the night sky?

" Everybody today is hampered by the fact that we live in the cities and the suburbs and our night sky is a lot brighter than our parents and our Grandparents night sky was. What can you expect to actually see in the night sky with a telescope that you can afford and that you can actually lift?

Well, surprisingly you can see a lot. First, you can see the moon. The Moon is a fantastic object to look at with your telescope. It actually resembles a landscape. You can see mountains and craters and all kinds of details. In some cases, it almost looks like you're in a flyover. It's a pretty exciting object to watch. And because its aspect changes during the month, it's a fantastic object to watch every night of the month.

Then moving out from the Moon, well there are the other planets. There is the large planets like Jupiter and Saturn, everybody loves Jupiter and Saturn and of course you can also see Mars and Venus and Mercury at times and if you have a large enough scope you can even see Neptune. This can all be seen in a city.

And then moving out from the solar system into what we call the deep sky, we have the galaxy around us, "The Milky Way". The Milky Way is filled with star clusters, there is more than one different kind of star cluster, some with as many as a million stars, orbiting the center of our galaxy and these look really fantastic in a telescope no matter how small.

And as we move out from the Galaxy, there are lots of other Galaxies out there in the universe they estimate there might be as many as one quadrillion of them in our Universe. And the larger the telescope that you have, the larger the size of the Universe that you can see and the more objects you can see in that Universe. For what is worth, it's a very nice example of what to do if you go to a star party, stand in line and look at the same objects that are your favorite objects when you are looking through a very big telescope.

Now of course if you have chosen the right type of telescope you can easily transport that telescope to a much darker sight where your telescope will see much deeper into the universe and you will see more details and the objects in the night sky. And chances are likely if you go place this frequented by a lot of other amateurs you will have somebody there to help, guide you to a number of new objects in sky that you haven't seen before.

So that concludes our talk. I appreciate the fact that you've listened to me for all of this period of time and this concludes our talk on how to select and use a telescope.