As one who added the study of astronomy to my natural philosophy repertoire rather late in life, I found it a bit challenging to get the gist of just what I was looking at whenever I cast my eyes skyward (and if I’m honest, I very often still do). Not that there aren’t a number of worthy books offering guidance regarding “what is what” up there; the challenge was that I had long ago become accustomed to terrestrial observation – beginning, as one so often does, with the observation of birds and its use of field marks and other similar visual cues. However while the skills acquired in learning to identify birds have a high level of transferability to learning to identify, for example, insects, none of them really apply in any significant way in learning to identify astronomical objects.
Beginning to Look Up
