7. Take a deep dive into a constellation
This activity is great because you can keep it simple or get quite complex. Choose any constellation: Orion is a great choice during the winter because it is full of interesting sights and easy to spot.
Research your constellation’s Greek mythology. Do the star patterns look like the character or object? How does it compare to mythologies from other cultures? What do you think it looks like? Draw your own character and write a story about them.
On a moonless night, count how many stars you can see in the constellation when you first go out, before your eyes have adapted to the darkness. Repeat after 15 and 30 minutes outside. How many more stars can you see? Are they different colours? Try again under a bright Moon. Does this affect your count? You can even then try with the constellations that lie adjacent to it.
Sketch your constellation, paying attention to the stars’ spacing and magnitude (brightness) differences. Drawing makes you a better observer, so encourage everybody to try! Take a photo of your constellation using a smartphone camera and app such as NightCap, or with a DSLR camera. Are there more stars in the photo compared to what you see?
Use a star chart and choose some deep-sky objects in your constellation and see if you can find them using binoculars or a telescope, learning how to get to them by star-hopping.
If you want to get complex, use theory to work out a star’s absolute magnitude. First find the apparent magnitudes of nearby stars (how bright they look from Earth) and use them to estimate the apparent magnitude (m) of the stars in your constellation. The absolute magnitude (M) is how bright the stars would look if they were all 10 parsecs away. Look up the distances (d) to the stars in your constellation (in parsecs) and combine these with the apparent magnitudes to calculate the absolute magnitude from those figures, using the following formula: M = m + 5 – 5 log d