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the sun, it's dark side will point at different stars each time), it's important to get the right month.

A better approach (albeit slightly more expensive) is to get a good book on amateur astronomy. One that I highly recommend has been a personal favorite of mine for years. I used to check it out of the library when I was a little kid, and now I own my own copy (Mine is now the 4th Edition). It's called "Starwatch" by Terence Dickinson, and I can't say enough good things about this book.

Beyond just the basic star charts, which it has, it has tons of simple, practical advice for beginners on how they can get the most out of their experience. It gives the complete beginner tips on finding his way around the basic constellations; the Big and Little Dippers, the North Star, Orion, and so on. Using a few of these basic starting points, it shows you easy ways to find other places of interest. The idea is to slowly build your way out from these guide points, as you gradually familiarize yourself with more and more of the night sky. You don't need any equipment outside just that book for a while, as you slowly just familiarize yourself with the night sky.

The next step up would be to pull out a pair of binoculars. Most people own a pair, or know someone who does that they could borrow. Looking at the night sky through binoculars can really be an eye-opening experience if you've never done it before. Point them at the moon, again. Now instead of just like and dark patches, you should be able to see shadows in craters, mountains, valleys, bright rays of light coming from big impact craters, and all kinds of neat stuff. You'll never look at the moon the same way again after you've really seen it like that.

Most people would suspect that looking at the full moon would be best for this sort of exercise, but actually I'd recommend looking at a smaller phase, for two main reasons. One is that a full moon is so bright that it will drown out a lot of the detail, and second (and more importantly), the most fun place to look at the moon in phase is at the "terminus", the line between night and day. That's where the detail stands out the best!

Get up to date planetary information, and you can point your binocs at them as well. If you are in a dark enough location, and have good enough binoculars and a really steady hand, you should be able to just pick out Saturn's rings, still one of my favorites. Jupiter is also a great binocular target, you should be able to see some of it's

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