The clear night sky beckons but you hesitate on going out because you will have to lug your telescope out of the basement, set it up and let it thermally stabilize before you can start viewing. Or, maybe you don’t even have a telescope. There is an alternative—grab your binoculars and go!
Most people don’t consider binoculars when they think about astronomy. After all, binoculars are for bird watching and hunting, right? Wrong! Binoculars are an important instrument used by many astronomers to view the night sky and to compliment the telescope during their observation session. You will not see Jupiter’s red spot with them but you will see wonderful, wide-field objects like the Andromeda galaxy (M31), the Pleiades (M45) or globular clusters like Omega Centuri (NGC-5139) and let’s not forget the true wanderers of the solar system—comets. Their long tails can only be appreciated with the naked eye or a pair of binoculars.
Before we talk about what you need to look for in selecting a pair of binoculars, take a look at the image gallery below. These are simulated images of some celestial objects and how they might appear in a pair of 7x50 binoculars versus an eight-inch reflecting telescope with a focal length of 1200mm and a 25mm eyepiece. (These images were created using a program called Starry Night and are only an approximation of what you would truly see. The field of view and magnification for the binoculars is about 7.5 degrees and 7x, while the field of view and magnification for the telescope is about 1 degree and 48x times.)
As you may be able to see from the images, a pair of binoculars is not going to give you the same view as a telescope. It will be different. You will get less magnification but a wider field of view, the advantage of using both eyes instead of one, which helps in processing the image in our brains enhancing contrast and sharpness and the ease of scanning an area of the sky for a target of interest. (For more information on telescopes, see the article on Telescopes for Beginning Amateur Astronomers.)