If you were on Santa’s nice list and found a new telescope under your Christmas tree, you can have a lot of fun with it, but it can also be very frustrating.

Let me help you with some tips about how to use your scope that may not be in the instructions. Let me also suggest some great, initial “first light” targets in the Butler sky.

Telescope tips• Let it cool off. The most important thing to remember this time of year is to put your telescopes and all the eyepieces outside for a good 30 to 45 minutes before you use them.The optics have to acclimate to the lower temperatures or you’ll be treated to really fuzzy views of our universe.By the way, you never want to poke your telescope out a window because the warm air escaping your house will do nothing but foul up your image and raise your gas bill.• Not all clear nights are created equal. The stars may be shining brightly, but high winds in the upper atmosphere and/or near the ground cause what’s called bad seeing conditions.Except for the moon, most other targets, like planets, nebulae and galaxies, are susceptible to bad seeing resulting in poor resolution that might lead you to believe that you have a bad scope. One sign of bad seeing is that the stars will be twinkling more than usual.A great website to check on seeing conditions for your location is called Clear Sky Clock at http://cleardarksky.com/csk/• Make sure your finder scope or device is synced up with your main scope. Now here you’ll probably have to check the directions that came with your scope. Most scopes come with small telescopes that ride piggyback on the main one.Some scopes, though, have other finding tools like lasers. Whatever you have for a finder, make sure it’s lined up with your main scope or you’ll have a devil of a time getting celestial treasures into your eyepiece.The best thing to do is every time you use your scope use a bright, prominent object on your horizon like the light on radio tower or a lit up American flag. With a low-power magnification eyepiece, center the main scope on the land object. Then adjust the finder scope or device so it’s also centered on that same item.Then, when it comes to finding a celestial target, you can be assured that when it’s in your finder it’ll also be in your main scope, and you won’t have to flounder around in the dark.• Take your time. Whatever you’re observing through your telescope, make yourself comfortable and take long, continuous looks to your target, at last five to 10 minutes at a time.You need to get used to the light level in your eyepiece field and you also want to wait for moments when seeing conditions get extra nice and you get calm patches of atmosphere between your scope and the celestial target. This especially goes for viewing the planets.Along with this, use your lowest-power magnification eyepiece first and work your way up to higher-powered eyepieces. It’s natural for the images to lose some their clarity and sharpness as you increase magnification.

Best telescope targets• The moon.This week we have a new crescent moon in the early evening western sky. It’ll be a great time to actually view the moon because you can really see a lot of details like craters and mountains and the longer shadows. This will really give you perspective on how high some of these mountains are.Your best views will be right around what’s known as the terminator, the line between the sunlit and darkened part of the moon.Full or near full moons are tough to look at because of the brightness that washes out details on the surface and can literally give you a headache.• Jupiter.Currently Jupiter is lighting up the southeastern sky and is the brightest starlike object in the night sky.You should be able to resolve the disk of the giant planet and easily see up to four of Jupiter’s brighter moons.If it’s clear enough with good seeing you may also see some of Jupiter’s cloud bands and even the great Red Spot. I’ll have more on Jupiter’s moon and atmosphere next month in Skywatch.• Pleiades Star Cluster.This is the best star cluster. It’s easily seen with the naked eye in the mid to high southeastern sky.Through even a small telescope you can see dozens of very young stars more than 400 light years away. One light-year equals almost six trillion miles.• The Perseus Double Star Cluster.This is wonderful, and it’s nearly visible to the naked eye.Aim your scope very high in the sky between the constellation Cassiopeia the Queen and Perseus the Hero as you can see on the diagram.It’s one of my very favorites as you’ll see two distinct clusters of stars side by side.They’re both 7,000 light years away. I know you’ll love what you see!• The Orion Nebula.This is simply wondrous through the eyepiece of your telescope. You can easily find it with the naked eye as a fuzzy, middle star in the three stars that make up the sword of Orion the Hunter.Through your scope, you’ll see a glob of gas with a little bit of a greenish tint to it. It’s a giant cloud of hydrogen gas around 1,500 light years away. Within it, you should be able to see four faint stars arranged in a trapezoid.They are very young stars, some less than 50,000 years old. These stars are producing so much ultraviolet radiation that they’re causing the surrounding nebula that they were born in to glow like a fluorescent light.• The Andromeda Galaxy.The next door neighbor galaxy to our Milky Way is nearly overhead in the constellation Andromeda the Princess.Check out my January star map on my website www.lynchandthestars.com for details that will help you find it.