RocketSTEM Issue #3 - October 2013 | Page 42

Starting in astronomy beginner’s guide to stargazing By Mike Barrett recognising the night sky When you look up into the night skies you will see a myriad of twinkling stars. With all of the stars in the sky you would have thought it would be impossible to recognise individual ones, but you would be wrong. Of course, nobody can recognise all of them but by starting to see patterns in the skies you can start to pick out individual stars and constellations and learn to navigate your way around. Going back thousands of years in time our ancient relatives used the stars to help navigate and needed to find a reliable way of determining which star was which and where it should be in the sky. To do this they started visualising patterns in the sky that meant things to them. Almost everybody in the northern hemisphere will have seen The Plough or Big Dipper in the Constellation Ursa Major. If you follow the line of the last two stars in up in the sky you will see the Pole Star or Polaris. This is the first important lesson in Astronomical Navigation: Polaris moves very little, almost standing still, all the other pole star The Pole Star (Polaris in the Northern hemisphere) stays at a fixed location in the sky and all the other stars rotate around it. stars in the Northern hemisphere appear to rotate around it. Polaris is always in the North so having found Pola &