Don’t be alarmed, now you don’t have to sit over reference books for a long time – convenient applications for computers, tablets and smartphones allow you to quickly navigate the night sky. The first step is to install the Stellarium planetarium program on your computer. It is enough to indicate your city, and the program will calculate what arrangement of stars, planets and constellations is visible in the sky at any given time. The program can even show which satellites are passing by, although sometimes it is wrong. Stellarium is also available in versions for tablets and smartphones. There is a good Google Sky Map application for Android, StarWalk for iOS. They are arranged like this: you aim the camera at a section of the sky and you see it on the screen, only in the form of a detailed map – with the names of constellations and planets.
What technique is needed to observe space?
You can start with a simple 20x binoculars. It is quite enough to see the satellites of Jupiter, to vaguely distinguish the tilt of the ring near Saturn during the period of oppositions and the shape of the ISS. With binoculars, you can even see the Andromeda galaxy (in the form of a foggy cloud) or the Orion Nebula from the city in winter. The moon looks great through binoculars, especially against the background of clouds: you can distinguish large craters and a rather complex surface structure, which is visible to the eye as several spots.