Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders

We wish someone else had written this book years ago. We could have used it ourselves when we started observing the night sky. Instead, we had to deal on our own with the same two problems that every beginning amateur astronomer faces: which objects to observe and how to fi nd them. There are any number of observing lists, of course, some of them much better suited for beginning and intermediate observers than others. The Astronomical League (www.astroleague.org) has several observing lists suitable for beginners (along with many others suited only for advanced observers). RASC, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (www.rasc.ca), publishes an excellent list for intermediate observers. As useful as these lists are, when we were getting started what we really wanted was a consolidated list by constellation that included a wide variety of astronomical objects of all types for both telescopic and binocular observing. So for this book we made our own list by merging the best observing lists for beginning and intermediate astronomers.