Finding Polaris: Navigating the night sky for beginners

How many objects can you identify and name in the night sky? It is often surprising how little we can really find and name when we are faced with a brilliant starry night. I’d like to bring you on a tour of some of the more common objects and try to find some of the exotic ones. I’ll try to cover at least one topic each week for a few weeks.

Finding Polaris, the North Star.

Polaris is perhaps the most famous of stars although you may just have heard of it as the North Star or the Pole Star. The fact that it remains roughly above our Northern Pole means that as the Earth rotates all the stars appear to move except Polaris which appears to stay in the same spot.

Polaris is NOT the brightest star in the sky despite what some people might think. It is not unheard of to find Jupiter and assume that it is the North Star based on how bright it is.

The best way to find Polaris is to follow the constellation Ursa Major, which also goes by quite a few different names.

The Plough - Ursa Major - The Big Bear - The Big Dipper

We can see how Ursa Major points to Polaris in the following image as you follow the bottom 2 stars to a medium bright star.

Finding Polaris

It is also important to know that because all of the stars rotate around Polaris, the constellation Ursa Major also rotates aroound Polaris. This means that as the night gets later, Ursa Major rotates around Polaris.

Below is an animated gif which I created using a series of images taken from the iPhone applicaiton pUniverse (Pocket Universe). I used http://www.gifninja.com to generate the image which shows a series of stars rotating around Polaris. It shows the position of Ursa Major in hourly intervals from 10:16 in the eventing to late in the night as it appears in October, click on the link to see the animation.