Here are some common questions I get asked. Have a question you think should be on here? Contact me!

1. What kind of telescope should I get?
2. Is the North Star the brightest star?
3. What is a "light-year"?
4. How much magnification ("power") is your telescope?
5. Is there some kind of numeric coordinate system in the sky like like longitude/latitude?
6. Why do stars twinkle but planets don't?
7. Why do we see different constellations in the sky at different times of year?
8. What is special about the twelve constellations we know as "the Zodiac"?
9. What are Blue, Blood, Harvest, Black and Super Moons?
10. What is the "Dark Side of the Moon"?
11. What is a Black Hole?
12. How does the brightness scale for stars (Magnitudes) work?

What kind of telescope should I get?

This could be the single most common question I hear at my events. A really good answer I like to give is, "The one you'll actually use!" While I consider this to be really good advice it doesn't exactly define a course of action does it? So let's explore this topic in more detail so you can make an informed decision…

Is the North star (polaris) the brightest star?

There is something unique about the star we call "Polaris" or the "North Star". Many people are under the impression that it's uniqueness comes from it's brightness thinking that it's the brightest star in the sky (other than the Sun of course). When I point the North Star out at stargazes this misconception quickly becomes evident when the observer immediately sees that it's nowhere close to being the brightest star in the sky. So what's unique about Polaris?

What is a "Light year"?

Over the years of talking to people at stargazes I've come to understand that there are a great many people who have heard the term "light-year" but think that because it has the word 'year' in it it must be a measurement of time. Reasonable as this may seem at first, it is not correct; a light-year is a unit of distance. Getting a handle on understanding how far a light year is, is key to beginning to grasp the vastness of the Cosmos in which we live.

How Much Magnification (Power) is your telescope?

I understandably get asked this question every week. People instinctively want to know how much magnification it takes to see the great things we look at. The disconnect in this question is thinking that it's the telescope itself that provides magnification without understanding that a telescope is really a ‘system’ rather than a ‘thing’. So understand that the function of the telescope itself is to gather light and bring it to a focal point and it's the lenses or ‘eyepieces’ that actually provide your magnification.

Now that we've established that the north star is not special in terms of brightness (it's the 48th brightest) , let's see why it is a very special star, at least for now… Polaris is a star in the sky that quite by chance just happens be located directly over the North Pole of the Earth. That is, if you were standing on the North Pole and looked exactly straight up, also called the Zenith, the North Star would be right there.

Well chances are good you're not standing on the north pole (because it's just a bunch of ice floating around up there–no land, and I hear the weather is horrible) so if you're anywhere in continental America you're somewhere between 29° and 49° North Latitude. Remember, there are 90 degrees of Latitude from the Equator (0 degrees) to the Poles (90 degrees North or South). So if you are standing by the beach in Hilton Head, South Carolina, you are at 32 degrees North Latitude and therefore the North Star is 32 degrees above the horizon. If you are in St. Paul Minnesota, you are at 45 degrees North Latitude and Polaris will appear exactly halfway up from the horizon to the zenith at 45° elevation in the sky because your location is halfway from the equator to the North Pole.

Spin Zone

So what the north star is aligned with is actually the spin axis of the Earth. If you were to draw a line from the South Pole, through the center of the Earth out the North Pole and extend it out into space for 430 light-years you would eventually arrive at Polaris.

Now look again at the photo at the top of this section and it will make a bit more sense to you now. When you look at Polaris you are looking right along the Earth's spin axis so the stars in that vicinity will appear to "pinwheel" counter-clockwise around Polaris at the center because of the rotation of the planet once every 24 hours. So if you stood and looked at the stars near Polaris for a solid 24 hours (assuming it was dark the whole time) you could observe any particular star make a full 360° circle around Polaris.

But wait, there's more!

So now that you understand that Polaris is the North Star purely by chance alignment, lets dig a little deeper and I'll tell you something that you were probably unaware of: you are wobbly! Not you personally (although I do know a couple people like that) but all of us here on Earth. The wobble that I'm talking about is that the entire Earth wobbles in the same way that a spinning top wobbles as it starts to slow down. Our wobble isn't caused by our spin rate slowing down but rather by the combined gravitational influences of the Sun and Moon which over the eons have tugged the earth into a very slow wobble. This means that the spin axis of the Earth is actually "pointing" out into space describing a full circle with each complete wobble, once every 25,800 years!

And it's not just a little wobble either! It's a full 47°, enough to make the truly bright star Vega the "new North Star" 12,000 years from now. The official name for this effect is called ‘precession’. Rather than try and describe this I've found a couple images on the internet that very clearly demonstrate this:

First let's get a beam on how fast light travels which is 186,000 miles in a second–nothing can go faster. Radio waves, television and all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum (X-Rays and Gamma Rays) all travel at the speed of light as well as gravity and magnetism.

Now check out the above diagram. Before we can talk about light years, let's bring it down a little closer to home, how about a "light-second" which would be the 186,000 miles. The Moon is about 230,000 miles away more or less so it takes light about 1.3 seconds to get there. That's why the radio conversations with the Apollo astronauts sounded so stilted, when Mission Control would say something, 1.3 seconds would elapse before the astronaut heard it, then the astronaut would speak his reply and it would travel back to Earth in another 1.3 seconds. Or you could think of a light second this way: a beam of light could circle the Earth 10 times in the time it takes to say "Hello" to Buzz Aldrin on the Moon.

Once you get outside our immediate neighborhood in the solar system things start to stretch out quite a bit. Light would take 6 minutes to get to Venus, 18 minutes to Mars–making the concept of "driving" those Mars rover missions in real-time simply impossible. Getting a message to Saturn 875 million miles away is about 1 hour 20 minutes at light speed and lonely Neptune, hanging out at the edge of the planetary part of the solar system (sorry Pluto) at 2.8 billion miles is about 4 light-hours.

Like Sand Through the Light-Year Glass

So how many miles does light travel in a year? The answer is six trillion miles in a year. There's that word, ‘trillion’ and we started talking about a ‘billion’ earlier. These numbers are so large that it's almost incomprehensible because we rarely encounter actual objects in these kind of numbers in our daily lives so it becomes an impossible abstract. Now I can't think of a good way to contrast the difference between a million/billion/trillion using distances so let's try something a little more real–and perhaps more fun: money! (Click to scroll these four slides…)

So a light-year is six trillion miles and the nearest star is 4.4 of those! As you can see, even using miles as your measurement standard is just about useless; it would be like measuring the distance from here to Cleveland using the width of a human hair as your unit of measurement!.

So now that we understand that a telescope is an optical ‘system’; let's turn our attention a little more closely on each of the areas of interest and how they interact with each other.

Focus on this

Every telescope has a ‘focal length’, expressed in millimeters (mm) which is defined as the distance traveled by the light from first entering the optical system to arriving at a single point of focus. In a reflecting telescope this begins at the mirror and in a refractor at the initial objective lens. Focal lengths of scopes commonly used in the amateur community are anywhere from 400mm to 2000mm depending on the design and size.

While using your telescope you will put an eyepiece (pictured above) in the holder and adjust it in or out until it's exactly at the point of focus for your scope. The eyepiece also has a focal length which is expressed in mm as well which makes the following formula fairly easy to understand.

Telescope focal length divided by eyepiece focal length equals the actual magnification for that particular system.

So, take my 32mm Meade SuperPlossl eyepiece and drop it into a 600mm focal length scope (fairly short) and that setup yeilds 19x magnification.
 Put it into my scope which is 1050mm and it comes out to 33x. Put it into a 2000mm long scope like a big refractor or a Schmidt-Cassegrain design and that setup gets you to 63x power. So you see the same eyepiece can be 19x or 63x depending on the optical system it's employed in..

Right Ascension and Declination

The coordinate system we use in the sky is pretty much an exact mirror of the latitude/longitude system we use on Earth projected into the sky but with different names and measurement units–just to make it difficult of course.

First we'll talk about the equivalent to latitude which in the sky is called "Declination" and is measured in degrees. Latitude on the Earth works like this: standing at the Equator you are at 'zero degrees' latitude. Take a few steps to the North and you are now in North Latitude territory or if you head South you are in the South Latitude zone. Rings of constant latitude are called 'parallels' and extend around the whole Earth and increase in degrees from zero at the equator to 90 degrees (North or South) at the poles. 

Declination works exactly like this except instead of using the labels North and South we use plus and minus declination values. Any declination that is plus (positive) in value is that number of degrees headed away from zero towards the North Celestial Pole which is the spin axis of the Earth projected onto the sky and would have a value of +90°. Any 'Dec.' value that is in negative numbers is below the equator and headed towards the south pole of the Earth which would be -90° Dec.

The astronomical equivalent to longitude is referred to as "Right Ascension" (abbreviated as "R.A.") and is measured in hours, minutes and seconds. On the Earth, a line of longitude known as a 'meridian' extends in a line from the North Pole to the South Pole with one very special meridian called the Prime Meridian that runs north to south through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich England, since they had the most astronomical 'game' when all this stuff was being nailed down for real in 1884 by the International Meridian Conference–bet that was a rockin' party!

Locations to the west of the Prime Meridian proceed in increasing degrees ("West Longitude") ranging in value until 180° has been reached. Locations to the east of the Prime Meridian also increase by degrees ("East Longitude") until 180° which, if you haven't guessed by now, is exactly the same place as 180° W. Long. since there are 360° in a circle. This is the central location for the International Date Line by the way.

In the sky we use the same basic concept for our Right Ascension measurement except we don't measure using degrees; instead we use a full 24 hours, minutes and seconds as the unit of measurement, proceeding eastward from the zero point which is at the vernal equinox–a place on the celestial sphere where the Sun crosses the celestial equator, in the constellation Pisces, which happens every March.

So the chart position of the bright star Capella in the constellation Auriga would be expressed as: RA: 5 hours, 17' (minutes), 55.43" (seconds); Dec. +46 degrees, 00' (minutes), 46.4" (seconds).

The short answer to the twinkling stars question is that the Earth's atmosphere is very turbulent, with multiple layers, some of which are frequently moving in opposite directions. The light from the stars gets buffeted around by all these windy layers and interrupts the steady stream of starlight in random ways causing the star to ‘twinkle’ as we call it.

However, on any given night there might be a bright (Jupiter, Venus) or medium bright (Saturn, Mars or Mercury) light in the sky that isn't twinkling like stars of similar brightness are. Doesn't their light have to go through the same turbulent atmosphere the starlight does? So why don't they twinkle?

The key to resolving this paradox are the distances involved. The planets are far away, by human standards: Mars is 60 million miles, Jupiter 475 million miles, Saturn 850 million miles. But that is nothing compared to the Cosmos, even just the local neighborhood. Perhaps this quote from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says it best:

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist (drugstore), but that's just peanuts to space."

Let's take the star Sirius, the brightest star in the sky (besides the Sun of course) visible to the south west if the constellation Orion a popular Winter/Spring constellation. It is the brightest star because it's both an inherently giant, bright star, but it's also pretty close by, only twice as far away as the nearest star to us. That distance is 8.6 light years. A light year is 6 trillion miles so Sirius is 51.6 trillion miles away. To try and get a handle on how much larger a trillion is than a million, look at the question on this page about how far a light year is and look at the graphics there, it will blow your mind.

So, even though a star is thousands or tens of thousands of times bigger than a planet the fact that it's so far away means that the light we see from it is essentially a single stream of photons which is what we call particles of light. This single beam of light is easy disturbed by the ten or more miles of turbulent air it has to pass through to get to your eyes.

A planet, especially a large one like Jupiter or Saturn are big enough and close enough that the light we get from them is actually a shaft or you could also think of it as a 'tube' of light, one that actually has some width to it. This makes for a much more robust light beam that is less susceptible to atmospheric disturbance although I can recall at least a few times that the atmosphere was so turbulent that I saw planets twinkle too, just not as much as the stars.

Sirius is actually one of the few 'single' stars (it actually has a close, small companion but you'll have to work very hard to see it) that is actually fun to look at! Train your telescope on it at medium power on a ‘twinkly’ night and it'll be flashing away all the colors in the rainbow like it was a light on the floor of a dance club; so take a look at "Club Sirius" sometime…

The answer to this question is actually easy to understand, if you can mentally ‘step back’ and view the Earth/Sun system like the diagram above.

So let's compare the solar system's configuration at four times during the year; how about Summer and Winter (the Solstices) and Spring and Fall (the Equinoxes) which happen on or about the 21st day of June & December, and March & September, respectively.

If you were standing on the Earth facing out into space with your back exactly to the Sun (the definition of ‘local midnight’) you would be looking out into the local neighborhood of our galaxy seeing those particular patterns of bright-ish stars we call ‘constellations’. Fast forward three months and you have ridden the Earth one quarter of the way around and are now looking 90° in a different direction out into the galaxy and seeing a completely different pattern of stars.

So the reason you can't see Sagittarius in December is because you'd have to look back through the Earth and through the Sun because you are pointed in the completely opposite way. So it's the 365 day progression of the Earth around the Sun in it's orbit that presents you with the different constellations from season to season.

A note about the nightly movement of the stars in the sky

As astronomers we find ourselves out under the night sky for hours at at time and sometimes it's quite fascinating to note how the sky has rotated during your observing session; “Vega was over there when we started tonight, now it's high overhead!”

This is due to the rotation of the Earth on it's axis making one revolution every 24 hours so it is effectively spinning you below the sky which is the reason why things rise in the east, stay in the sky for awhile and set in the west. So don't confuse this nightly phenomenon with the yearly cycle of seeing the different constellations. The daily rotation of the Earth will allow you to see ‘last season's’ constellations for awhile setting in the west during the early evening and the coming season's constellations late at night in the hours preceding sunrise.

There are a total of eighty eight constellations covering the entire northern and southern skies. Some are really large, covering vast areas of the sky, like URSA Major 'The Bear' which includes the asterism we call the Big Dipper. Others will fit easily behind a couple of fingers held at arm's length. Yet most people only know, or have at least heard of, the same twelve constellations–the ones that make up what we refer to as the Zodiac constellations which are associated with that load of rubbish called astrology. So why these particular twelve?

To understand this you have to be aware of the basic structure of our solar system. Before there was a star where the Sun is now there was a gigantic cloud of hydrogen gas and dust that was collapsing onto a central area. This collapse wasn't uniform or symmetrical and so there was some rotation imparted in the counterclockwise collapse which remains to this day in the form of the orbits of the planets, asteroids and other major members of the solar system. Furthermore, pretty much all the planets are spinning on their axes counterclockwise as well.

For the most part all the planets orbit in a single flat plane around the Sun. All the orbits are slightly elliptical (Mars being more than most), and a few are tilted a little (Mercury), but on a large scale it's all pretty flat. On the Earth, we are not spinning straight up and down with respect to this overall plane; we are tilted over 23.5° so our rotational axis is somewhat mis-aligned with the plane of the overall solar system.

Since the Sun, Moon, and planets are basically all in the same plane, when we see them in our sky they follow a very similar path, which is referred to as the ‘Ecliptic’ which is basically the plane of the solar system projected on the sky as we see it from Earth.

The Sun, Moon and planets are all relatively close; compared to the stars they're very close! Which means we see their position change in the sky from night to night with respect to the ‘fixed’ star background. This means the the Sun, Moon and planets will appear to travel 'through' a number of constellations during our yearly orbit around the Sun and their orbits around the Sun. The twelve constellations we know as the Zodiac are defined as the ones that are within twenty degrees of the Ecliptic and during the course of the year the Sun, Moon and planets will proceed from west to east, night by night, quickly or slowly based on their distance from us and our relative positions in the solar system.

It just so happens there are twelve constellations along this path in our sky and the astrology people seized on this to correlate that to roughly a month per constellation and then fabricate this entire phony narrative about how the positions of the Sun, Moon and planets in the various constellations at the time of your birth have some absolute bearing on your personality traits and how your life is going to unfold.

The reason you can be certain that astrology is a total crock is that there is a thirteenth constellation within 20° of the ecliptic; the constellation Ophiuchus, which is sandwiched in there between Libra and Scorpio. If astrology was science and not rubbish you'd have to accommodate Ophiuchus in your scheme of things; in the realm of real science you don't get to just ignore data just because it makes things ‘messy’. So by ignoring the presence of Ophiuchus makes astrology more in the realm of mythology rather than something real. Just sayin’…

Blue and black

The saying, “Once in a Blue Moon…” is used to describe something that doesn't happen very often, but what is a ‘Blue Moon’ and just exactly how infrequent are they?

A Blue Moon has two popular definitions. One of the earliest uses of the term was in the Farmers Almanac used to refer to the third full moon in a season that had four full moons in it instead of the usual three. It has also become known as the second full moon in any single calendar month. So when you have a full moon on the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd day of the month you can potentially have a Blue Moon at the end of the month depending on how many days there are in that particular month. The lunar cycle is 28 days so if you had your first full Moon on the 3rd of the month you can only have a Blue Moon in months with 31 days. Blue Moons are said to happen once every two or three years within a total cycle of nineteen years.

You could think of a Black Moon as the inverse of a Blue Moon; it's the third new moon out of a season that has four or a second new moon in a month. A Black Moon is of course dark because you can only see the unlit side at that time.

Harvest Moon

The Harvest Moon (also sometimes referred to as the Hunter's Moon) is the full moon closest to the Autumnal Equinox which hovers around September 22nd or 23rd each year. There's a little more to it than that however. During other times of year the Moon, no matter what part of the phase it's in, rises about fifty minutes later on each successive night; a result of it's orbital progress around the Earth. However, at the Autumnal Equinox, because of the angles of the Earth's axial tilt and the Moon's orbit, the Moon only rises thirty minutes later each day for a few days centered around the equinox. The perceived result of this is three days in a row with a full or nearly full Moon rising more or less at sundown which allowed farmers to extend their workday a few hours right at a critical time: the harvest.

Bloody Moony

The Blood Moon is not as officially well-defined as the others, referring to either the first full Moon following the Harvest Moon or describing the Moon as it appears during a total eclipse where it will usually turn some shade of red or orange depending on how much upper atmospheric dust is present in the Earth's atmosphere at the time. In the first definition the Moon's appearance is completely normal, the term only has to do with it's position in the year's calendar.

Super Moons

The term Super Moon really does have something to do with how the Moon actually appears. A Super Moon is a full Moon that is larger than a normal full moon, by as much as 14%. The reason why this happens is that orbits in the solar system are elliptical–not perfect circles as was once thought. When a moon is in an elliptical orbit, there is a point at which it's at its farthest distance from whatever it is that it's orbiting around which is called apogee. Of course that means that there's also a closest point in the orbit, half an orbit later, and that is referred to as perigee.

Every so often the Moon will be full when it's at perigee and then we see the Moon up to 14% larger and 30% brighter. If you're a frequent observer of the Moon you will find the difference fairly noticeable, and if not well you can enjoy a great full Moon anyway!

The “Dark Side of the Moon” is one of those things that you hear all the time that is just so completely and thoroughly wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to start with this one. As with so many of these misunderstood astronomical concepts there is something going on with the Moon and the Earth that when poorly understood can give rise to this sort of thing. So lets break it down…

What is going on between the Earth and Moon is that the Moon always keeps the same side facing towards us. The term for this is that the Moon is ‘tidally locked’ with the Earth, a condition that is quite common in our solar system; quite a few of Saturn's moon are tidally locked in this same way. As a result of this situation the Moon's day (the time it takes to spin once on its axis) and its year (the time it takes to make one complete trip around the Earth) are the same value: 28 days, and the result of that is that one hemisphere of the Moon is permanently facing us.

This means that until we started sending space probes into lunar orbit no human had ever seen the "far side" of the Moon. This probably has wrongly been equated with being ‘dark’, in that we can't see it, not that it doesn't receive any light ever which if you think about it, couldn't possibly be true! The Moon is a sphere hanging out in space and as such would always have one half lit and the other half dark, and which half that is would shift a little bit each day as it goes about its business.

Moon Noir

There is another way to interpret the phrase ‘dark side of the moon’ however; and that would be to find out which side reflects less light by having more dark areas actually on it.

In order to understand black holes and how they form we need to have some basic understanding about stars: what they are, and how they die. There are lots of interesting things about stars some of which seem perfectly logical and others that don't make any sense whatsoever.

Star On

Stars form in regions of concentrated hydrogen gas and dust left over from the rather clumpy explosion we call the Big Bang. If this gas concentration is big enough it will start to gravitationally attract more nearby gas and dust until you have a really large sphere of this stuff which gradually begins to contract down onto its central point. As you well know when things are compressed onto each other they generate heat; well something this big generates a lot of heat because the pressure at the center is almost unimaginably high. At some point the pressure and heat at the center is high enough to start a nuclear fusion reaction which is essentially a couple billion (or more for really big stars) continuously exploding H-bombs every second and a star is born!

This huge outpouring of energy from the center now counteracts the star's collapse and once things settle down and become stable the star reaches a nice equilibrium of collapse vs. explosion and the star begins it's life as a useful member of some galaxy.

Super Size Me

The range in sizes of stars is truly amazing. A star like our Sun which is huge compared to the Earth, is only about one third of the way to the top of the stellar brightness/hotness scale.

Stellar Death

No, that isn't the name of some an Astrophysicist Metal band but the range of ways stars can die is astounding as well, from a simple ‘fade to black’ to a huge explosion.

Low-Mass stars simply exhaust their fuel and burn out. Mid level stars swell up into Red Giant stars and sometimes evolve into what we call a planetary nebula, which is the former outer layers of a star drifting off with a white-dwarf star (it's former core) in the center.

Holed On

If the mass of the remnant Neutron star is between two to three (or more) of our Sun's masses then there is so much heavy stuff in so small an area that the thing that keeps neutron stars together (‘neutron degeneracy pressure’) is overcome by the crush and the matter here collapses in on itself into a point that is smaller than an electron, smaller than anything we know of and as matter of fact so small it doesn't occupy any "space" at all as we know it. This theoretical point is infinitely small and is referred to as a 'singularity' in physics terms be we know them as Black Holes.

So the same amount of stuff that would make a couple of stars is now in this tiny spot in space. This location now has immense gravitational attraction because of the mass at that point. The way gravity works is that the closer you are the harder it pulls, everybody knows that. But when you get really close to a gravity source it pulls extra hard, according to a rule called the inverse square law.

None more Black

So then, why are black holes black? To understand this you have to know a couple of things about the nature of light, down at the particle physics level. Light exhibits both the qualities of waves and particles. A particle of light is referred to as a ‘quanta’ of light; think of it like a little ‘packet’ of light. This light packet is affected by gravity and even though light doesn't weigh much and is moving really quickly (186,000 miles per second) it can be deflected or even captured by the black hole's gravity if it gets too close.

The distance from the actual singularity to the point where light can't escape anymore is called the Event Horizon. The actual distance is dependent on how much mass is at the center of the black hole; the more mass the shorter the distance to the event horizon. Because light (and all of its variations) are the method by we see things, and therefore obtain information about those things, since there is no light coming out we have pretty much no idea what's going on inside.

The laws of physics help us predict what happens around the event horizon and just inside it, but as you get closer to the singularity physical laws as we know them just don't work anymore. You thought dividing by zero was a mathematical no-no? Well the laws of physics as we understand them just completely blow up and are useless in the extreme environment at the singularity of a black hole. It's going to take a completely new area of understanding to describe the behaviors going on there which is going to be interesting since you can't see to perform or obtain any kind of result from any experiments you might want to conduct there.

If you were to design a system of organizing the brightnesses of things in the sky and you wanted to choose the most confusing, counterintuitive and non-sensical method possible, you could quite possibly end up with the system we have now! It rivals quirky the idea that we should choose 212° as the value for the ailing point of water yet that's what we've got and it seems to be hanging in there!

The magnitude scale has both positive and negative values which in and of itself isn't all that confusing except that as the positive numbers increase the objects get dimmer! As you might now expect, as the negative numbers increase (get more negative) objects get brighter. 

The other thing that's curious about this scale is where they chose to put the 0 point. You would think (assuming the positive/negative scale was a 'good idea' in the first place) that you would make the brightest star 0 and proceed dimming from there but noooooooo, the bright star Vega is Mag 0 but two other stars are in the negative, Canopus at Mag. -1 and Sirius the brightest star in the sky (other than the Sun of course) is Mag -1.6.

The Sun comes in at a whopping -26, the full Moon at about -12.5, Venus at it's brightest is about -4.5. Jupiter, Mars and Saturn can also be in negative numbers as well depending on how close we are to them.

There is a ton of great information about the magnitude scale contained in the chart above including how dim you can see with the naked eye and telescopes of various sizes; the difference between city and country viewing sites and how to compare various brightness magnitudes with 2.5 times difference per mag.

One thing to be careful about with magnitude values as they relate to looking at things with your telescope. Galaxies and other objects that take up a fair amount of width in the sky will fool you into thinking they're going to be bright when they really aren't. That's because the Magnitude value for the object is the sum of the total light output but when that's distributed over a large area the object in question is visually a lot dimmer than you'd expect, by a lot.

Nothing drove this point home to me clearer than trying to find the Pinwheel Galaxy (M33) in Triangulum, just West of the Great Square of Pegasus. The charts say that this thing is Mag. 5.8 (which would make it a naked eye object, and it is under perfect conditions in a super dark location) but when you go hunting for it with your scope (start with around 35x or you'll be looking right through it) it'll look as dim as 10th magnitude stuff you've been finding. So remember: Big objects are a lot fainter than the number would suggest!