Guides

Short pages that cut across everything on this site — the solar system in one read, our galaxy in another, and lists of what is genuinely worth looking at. Start wherever your question is.

If you want to understand something

• The solar system — one star, eight planets, and an enormous amount of empty space
• The Milky Way — our own galaxy, and why it looks like a band from inside
• Galaxies — the shapes there are, and what each shape means
• The universe — how big, how old, and how anybody could possibly know

If you want to go and look at something

• Everything you can actually see — sorted honestly by what equipment it needs
• What can I see tonight? — what to expect, and how to plan an evening
• The ten most interesting objects — six of them with your own eyes or a small telescope

If you are the grown-up

• For teachers — what fits which lesson, and what makes it classroom-safe
• For parents — where to start, and what to know before buying a telescope

Everything else

• Every object, one page each — all 104 of them, with what each one is and where to look
• How do we know? — nineteen explanations, each one a measurement somebody made
• A catalogue of every kind of thing — the taxonomy, generated from the database