A Solstice Announcement

.....I recently saw the (in my opinion, greatly undervalued) film, The Big Year, and that gave me an idea.  I am going to use my astronomy blogs to attempt my own "Big Year".  In the movie, the main characters are birders, who attempt to see as many different birds as they can during the course of a calendar year.  I am going to attempt to see (and report on) as many different things as possible in the sky over the course of a year.

.....Instead of using a calendar year (waiting until January 1st, 2013), I am choosing to start on the summer solstice because this starting point is at least more directly tied to astronomy, and because a lot of objects in the spring sky are galaxies, and kind of challenging to view.  For each of these objects, I hope to write up a little bit about the object, how to find it, what it looks like, and a bit about what the thing actually is - what we know about it, and how the object is being seen in modern astronomy.  Bold hopes!

.....The decision starts with the question of how to choose which things to look for.  Any star atlas will show hundreds of deep sky objects (objects outside of the solar system): double stars, variable stars, star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies.  How to choose?  The star atlas Sky Atlas 2000 has a tremendous number of objects, many requiring telescopes much larger than mine. (All references to specific products should not be taken to represent any relationship between myself and the producers of those products and myself - although, hey, this space for rent - these are representative products that I own, and that I will use for this project.)  If I use one of the catalogs of deep sky objects, then I could miss a lot of interesting objects left out by the list (such as the Messier Catalog, based off of observations made in the late 1700's) or objects out of my telescope's range (like many of the objects in the New General Catalog - the NGC from the 1840's, which replaced the General Catalog of the 1820's). 

.....I chose to use the Sky & Telescope's Pocket Sky Atlas, in the hopes that the editorial judgements made constructing this will leave material suitable for my quest, although there are some other objects that I'll throw in as well.

.....Well, tonight it is raining where I am, but I hope to get this show on the road tomorrow!  In the meantime, Happy Solstice!  (If you celebrate it.  If you don't, watch out for any large wicker figures.)