Welcome to theStarHopper.com. This site was created to share my love of Star Hopping and some of my favorite starhops. It will also be about general astronomy as well. I hope you enjoy it and find it helpful, if you have any ideas for improvement please feel free to contact me @ theStarHopper@gmail.com.

Star hopping refers to a way to locate otherwise hard to find astronomical objects. You usually start by finding the object on a star chart, then locate the nearest easy to find (naked-eye) star, object, or asterism. An asterism is a familiar shape of stars that is not a constellation (ie. the summer triangle, Big Dipper, etc) but there are smaller ones!   Once you have this you have your starting point. You can now use other stars to find a easy to recognize path to the object you want to observe!  Once you are out on the field you follow the same path to star hop to your objective.

Star hopping is a alternative to using computerized scope to find objects. While computerized scopes have their advantages (public events, astrophotography, etc). I feel you learn the sky better star hopping and in any case you need to still know a few bright stars to use computerized scopes.   Also, given two of the same scope, one computerized and one to star hop with, going to the same object, the object will look the same once you get there and while you may get there quicker with the computerized scope usually when star hopping you will see interesting things along the way!

So while you may see the same quality of objects I think star hopping will let you see a larger quantitiy of objects in the same viewing session!