Finding specific stars in the night sky might seem overwhelming. All those stars!
At a glance stars look like a million twinkling points of light that are impossible to sort out. But with a little information, you may discover hunting some stars is not so difficult.
Turns out we don’t see a million stars. Less than a couple thousand – and usually many fewer than that – are visible to most people’s unaided eyes. The brightest and nearest stars are easily found without a telescope or binoculars.
Stars Are Not Star-shaped
Stars are big balls of gas that give off heat and light. Sound familiar? Isn’t that what our Sun does? Guess what, our Sun is a star. It seems confusing, but all stars are suns. Like our Sun, stars are also in the daytime sky. During the day, the Sun lights up the atmosphere so we can’t see other suns… er…stars.
Our Sun isn’t even the brightest star. In fact all the stars we see at night are bigger and brighter than the Sun. It wins the brightness contest during the day simply because it is incredibly closer than all the other stars. (At night we don’t see the Sun because of Earth’s rotation. Our Sun is shining on the opposite side of Earth and we are in darkness.)
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