>>388692I live too close to civilization to have any good dark locations near me. The best dark sky spot I've ever visited was in the Australian Outback. I swear, you could see your own shadow by the light of the Milky Way on a moonless night.
I remember, back in the day, finding light polution maps, and importing them into Google Earth, to find the dark sky spots. Nowadays, things are easier:
http://darksitefinder.com/maps/unitedstates-15color.htmlAs far as star charts, any common planisphere of paper or cardboard will work. I like The Night Sky, by David Chandler. That said, I stopped using a traditional planisphere once I got an Android phone, and started using the Google Sky Map app. If you haven't used it yet, you're missing out. It even lets you toggle an all-red night mode.
>>388773Just my opinion, I'd go with binoculars, no contest. There are such things as travel and portal telescopes; none of them are as light and portable as binoculars. Binoculars give you dual-use, since they give you a rectified image, and you can use them in the daytime to spot things.
Generally speaking, if you're doing astronomy while /out/ hiking, magnification power just isn't important. Light collecting power is. You want nice big lenses to soak up as much light as possible, and send the concentrated stream to your eyes. That's what's going to let you see deep into the sky, not magnification. The Andromeda galaxy takes up more area in the sky than the full moon, but no one can see it, because it's just too faint. That issue is not solved by magnification, it's only solved through the gathering and concentrating of light. And too high a magnification makes the image shaky when you hold your binoculars.
Binoculars also give you a wider field of view, which makes moving from one object to the next SO much easier. And it increases your odds of seeing other interesting things you would otherwise miss, like satellites, meteors, the ISS, or comets.
