Night Sky Observing (Pt. 2) - SELECTING BINOCULARS

PART 2 of this "How To..." series discusses binocular specifications needed for night sky observing. Choosing the right binoculars is essential to backyard amateur astronomy.
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I found that a pair of 16x50 binoculars are ideal for general night sky viewing. They are relatively light easy to hold, give a good amount of light input and good sharp magnification of celestial objects. Looking at the milky way through them is absolutely breathtaking, you can see many many stars as long as there is very little light pollution. The Pleiades star system looks just amazing, and the Orion Nebula looks so beautiful. I have also seen the faint glow of the Adromeda galaxy through them, and 5 moons of Jupiter, so they do work extremely well. What really struck me about the milky way though, was that I was looking into the edge of our huge spiral galaxy, and the amount of stars you can see are quite staggering.