Counting Stars in your own skies

If we could count all the stars we see in the sky, how many would we count? Some students may think we can millions of stars with the unaided eye. Under ideal conditions, a person can see about 3,000 stars with the unaided eye. Astronomers estimate that our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains several hundred billion stars and that the universe contains some hundred billion galaxies. Thus, even the clearest sky allows us to see with our unaided eye only a tiny fraction of the total number of stars in the universe.

There are quite a few ways to cont the stars in your sky, depending upon whether you are an amateur astronomer or a person who has just been introduced to astronomy but know nothing about the objects and their alignments up there. In project dark skies we have been following different methods of counting stars. Using geometry and a readily available material, it's possible to estimate the approximate total number of stars visible to the unaided eye at any given time. It seems that one can’t count the number of stars in the sky but as you go through the instructions you will find how easy is it to count the stars if we do it in a logical way.

1. Counting the number of stars by seeing a particular area in the sky and matching the stars with a pattern already given to you.

2. Counting the stars (or rather estimating the number of stars) by pipe method.

3. Estimating the light pollution directly by measuring the glow in the sky with the help of an instrument.

4. Estimating the sky brightness (which in turns gives you the amount of light pollution) by DSLR.

Method 1 will be used for GISC-WWSC 2010 as this will be used all over the globe as a standard procedure.