Five things you can see in UK dark night skies with the unaided eye
The Milky Way (all year)
The Milky Way is simply our own galaxy, a spiral disc of hundreds of billions of stars, seen from the inside. In dark places it appears as a wonderful luminous stream across the sky: the combined light of countless stars receding into the distance. Its dark patches are the ashes of long-dead generations of stars, which have created, from the original hydrogen of the Big Bang, all the elements in us and in everything around us. The stars are truly our chemical parents.
The Andromeda Galaxy (autumn, winter)
Also known as M31, the Andromeda Galaxy is the furthest thing the human eye can see. Found by looking beneath the right-hand ‘V’ of the ‘W’ of the constellation Cassiopeia, it appears as a small, faint oval blur to the unaided eye. It is the largest galaxy in our Local Group of more than fifty stellar systems, the second largest being our Milky Way. The fossil light we see from M31 emanates from some trillion (one million million) stars, and left it 2.3 million years ago when early humans were beginning to find their way out of Africa into the wider world.
The Pole Star (all year)
The Pole Star (Polaris) is not as bright as many people think, and is fairly easily found by using as pointers the stars Merak and Dubhe in the Plough, part of the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear. If Polaris isn’t bright – it’s about the 50th brightest star in the sky – why is it famous? Its apparently fixed position in the sky shows us where North is. As you watch the night sky, you can see, as the hours pass, that everything seems to be rotating anticlockwise around the Pole Star. It is 432 light-years away from us.
The Pleiades (autumn, winter)
The Pleiades, Lord Tennyson’s ‘fire-flies tangled in a silver braid’, are a beautiful example of an open star cluster embedded within our Milky Way galaxy. Sometimes called the Seven Sisters, they were associated with rain and stormy weather by Greek and Roman sailors, as they first appear in the eastern sky in autumn. Telescopes show that these young hot stars, over 400 light years away, are wreathed in beautiful blue nebulosity.
The Orion Nebula (winter)
Below Orion’s three-star Belt is what looks like a small fuzzy patch. Recorded by a Stone Age artist on the wall of the Lascaux Cave in south-western France, this is the Orion Nebula (M42), a huge hydrogen gas cloud and birthplace of countless stars. It is nearly 1400 light years away from us.
A close up view can be seen on the Telescope Objects page.