Stars are scattered across the night sky like sequins on velvet. Over 2000 of them are visible to the unaided eye at any one time under the clearest conditions, but most are faint and insignificant. Only a few hundred stars are bright enough to be prominent to the naked eye, and these are plotted on the monthly sky maps in this book. The brightest stars of all act as signposts to the rest of the sky, as shown on pages 14–15. It is a welcome fact that you need to know only a few dozen stars to find your way around the sky with confidence. This book will introduce you to the stars month by month, without the need for optical aid, so that you become familiar with the sky throughout the year.

What is a star?

All stars are suns, blazing balls of gas like our own Sun, but so far away that they appear as mere points of light in even the most powerful telescopes. At the centre of each star is an immense natural nuclear reactor, which produces the energy that makes the star shine. Stars can shine uninterrupted for billions of years before they finally fade away.

Many bright stars have noticeable colours – for example, Antares, Betelgeuse and Aldebaran are reddish-orange. A star's colour is a guide to its temperature. Contrary to the everyday experience that blue means cold and red is hot, the bluest stars are actually the hottest and the reddest stars are the coolest. Red and orange stars have surfaces that are cooler than that of the Sun, which is yellow-white.