Primitive Vocabulary?

[SageUser]

APOD photo's are interesting, fascinating, often beautiful, and sincerely appreciated. Is there a simple layman's vocabulary for describing the spacetime locations of the object(s) in APOD photo's? For example: I have no clue what the words "toward the constellation Cetus, the Sea Monster" means? Is that North, East, South, or West from my location (Colorado, North America)? I do not have the time and or perhaps not even the ability to learn professional Astronomy. In this age of computers, it seems to me it should be possible to enter my GPS coordinates, the time & date, and the name of the APOD object (Abell 370) into a computer program and have the computer tell me the direction & height where the APOD (Abell 370) object is relative to me?

[Chris Peterson]

APOD photo's are interesting, fascinating, often beautiful, and sincerely appreciated. Is there a simple layman's vocabulary for describing the spacetime locations of the object(s) in APOD photo's? For example: I have no clue what the words "toward the constellation Cetus, the Sea Monster" means? Is that North, East, South, or West from my location (Colorado, North America)? I do not have the time and or perhaps not even the ability to learn professional Astronomy. In this age of computers, it seems to me it should be possible to enter my GPS coordinates, the time & date, and the name of the APOD object (Abell 370) into a computer program and have the computer tell me the direction & height where the APOD (Abell 370) object is relative to me?

"Toward the constellation Cetus" is non-standard usage (but common on APOD). The usual terminology is "in the constellation Cetus". The entire sky is broken up into 88 regions which are named after the classical constellations they contain.

The vast majority of objects in the sky are treated as fixed, and have coordinates which define their location on a fixed reference system (which also fixes which constellation they are found in). These coordinates are called right ascension and declination, with RA being equivalent to longitude on a sphere and declination equivalent to latitude.

Of course, the Earth rotates on its axis, making a complete rotation every day. So from our perspective, astronomical objects are always moving. Where they are relative to your position depends on the time and date, and they may not even be above the horizon. There are a number of free planetarium programs you can download for different platforms which will give you a map of the sky for a given time. There are also online planetariums. If you just Google on the coordinates of the object (which you can usually get from Wikipedia) you'll probably get multiple choices for maps.

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

I have no clue what the words "toward the constellation Cetus, the Sea Monster" means?

To find it right now look just to the south of the Sun (sunglasses recommended).

[Nitpicker]

I can thoroughly recommend Stellarium. It is free and good. Google it.

But even without that, or a decent sky map, the Wikipedia article on every individual constellation, lists its range in RA and DE. If the DE is not too far negative/south for your northern latitude (subtract 90 [or more practically, 70] degrees from your latitude and compare) and if the RA is more than two hours away from the current RA of the Sun, the object of interest should be visible for some period of time in your current night sky.

The Sun has a RA of 0 hours at the March Equinox, 6 hours at the June Solstice, 12 hours at the September Equinox and 18 hours at the December Solstice. At the moment, the Sun has a RA of ~3 hours, making observation of Cetus very difficult.

[starsurfer]

Get an astronomy book that includes starcharts that give you a basic idea of what is in the sky when. Cetus would be visible in the night sky in a few months time.