How many stars do you thing you see at night?

One of the things we were really looking forward to doing was going out into the middle of the desert with a professional astronomer and gaze at millions of stars whilst having some of his knowledge passed to us.  When we got there we were told ‘millions of stars is what we say in the brochure.  You’ve paid now.  You can only ever see about 3,000 stars with the naked eye and tonight with the full moon it’s less than 1,000.’ Both he and his wife were incredibly interesting however and pointed out various constellations, the closest stars, the zodiac part of the sky – which is also the elliptical plane the only part of the sky where you will ever see planets.  He had an assortment of huge telescopes through which we were shown the moon, Saturn, nebulae, a globular cluster, the jewellery box (3 stars close together which are yellow, blue and red respectively) and a binary star.  Definitely something I would recommend!