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For as long as there have been people, they have looked up at the night sky with wonderment, and sometimes fear. They sought to understand what they saw, and often made stories and based mythologies on them, trying to make patterns out of the seemingly random stars spread throughout the night sky.

Some things about us never change. The night sky still holds an almost supernatural allure and hold on our imaginations. Now, however, through improved tools and scientific knowledge, we can look with ever more confidence in what it is we are seeing. However, rather than lessen the sense of wonderment, if anything it has increased it, for me at least. I find it amazing to think that when I look up, I see the exact same stars that Isaac Newton saw. I see the same stars Edmund Halley saw. Going further back, I can see the stars as they appeared to Leif Ericson as he sailed to Vinland. I see the same stars as the ancient Mayans, as evidenced by their amazingly accurate calendars and astronomical observations. And so on.

That state of constancy is, to me, an almost religious experience, and it is even more so when you take into account the vast distances of interstellar space, and it's effect on time. When I look up at night and see the star Vega, I don't see the way it looks today. I see the way it looked 25 years ago, because it took the light from that star that long to make it to my eyeball. And Vega is one of the close ones! Consider instead our galaxy's next-door neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, barely visible to the naked eye on a clear night as a tiny fuzzy patch. This galaxy appears to us as it looked 2,300,000 years ago.

Now that you can get an idea of the allure of astronomy, the natural question is "how would a beginner get started?" The good news is that it is easy, and, if you prefer, completely free (at least until you get really hooked!) Go outside on the next clear night you can find, and look at the moon. No, REALLY look at the moon. Have you ever noticed the light and dark spots, and thought about why they are like that?

The internet has several sites that offer free star charts. They are not too hard to use, as long as you have a basic idea of directions where you are standing. If you'd prefer one on paper, you can find cheap ones in book stores, or you could buy an astronomy magazine like "Sky and Telescope" and have a look at a star chart in there. Since the sky changes seasonally (due to the different locations of the earth in it's annual journey around

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