The Andromeda Galaxy — M31 — is the most distant object visible to the unaided human eye, at 2.537 million light-years from us. The light you see when you find it tonight left the galaxy when our ancestors were still figuring out fire. It is a smear of pale grey on a dark night, roughly

Astrophotography of planets does not require expensive equipment. A small refractor, a colour camera capable of high frame-rate video, and a free copy of AutoStakkert will produce results that would astonish an observer from twenty years ago. The technique is called lucky imaging. You record a video of several thousand frames; the software discards everything

The Orion Nebula — M42 — is the brightest stellar nursery visible from Earth, and one of the few deep-sky objects you can locate without a star chart. The middle “star” of Orion’s sword is in fact a vast cloud of glowing hydrogen 1,344 light-years away, illuminated by a tight cluster of newborn stars at

On the question of how to choose your first telescope: do not. Begin with a pair of binoculars, ideally 8×42 or 10×50, and a folding chair. Spend three months looking at the Moon, the Pleiades, and the moons of Jupiter. Take notes. At the end of those three months, you will know what you actually

Saturn entered evening visibility this week, rising in the east just after 23:00 UTC. From a moderately dark site, the rings are immediately resolved in any telescope above 80mm aperture — and to the unaided eye, the planet is now an unmissable cream-coloured point in the constellation Aquarius. A short list of what to look