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 &