Finding Polaris - or finding North when it's dark

I thought it was high time you were all introduced to my drawing style - I'll leave the adjective for you, my lovely readers, to address. So what better to showcase my drawing than a post about finding the North Star?

The North Star, which is current Polaris, is quite well aligned with the Earth's axis and allows us to get an approximation of North in the night sky. The drawing to the left shows that the stars around Polaris will appear to orbit in an anti-clockwise direction from our Earthly perspective. Before Polaris was our North Star is was called Cynosura, it is the brightest star of Ursa Major and the brightest in its area of the night sky.

The Plough is often used to find Polaris and it is shaped like a pan. When looking for constellations youneed to consider that due to the Earth's rotation, the constellation may not be in the orientation shown in the drawing. This is something that was clearly illustrated to me as I drove Up North one night, I was able to watch the rotation for around 4 hours as I was driving in a mostly Northerly direction. The two stars at the pan's edge align quite well with Polaris. 5 times the distance between these two stars will lead you to Polaris.

Another constellation that I find useful for finding, or confirming that I'm looking at Polaris is Cassiopeia. It's useful to have a couple of ways of finding Polaris, due to potential cloud cover. Unfortunately with Cassiopeia there isn't an alignment with more than one star. I tend to use the one that is closest to Polaris. Polaris is around half way between The Plough and Cassiopeia.

It's important to note that you can use whatever stars you want to find Polaris. I've used these constellations because they are the ones most used and you'll be able to find additional information about using these constellations online or in books. In reality you can make up your own constellations and methods for reading the night sky. The constellations that we refer to are historical and sometimes the stars have no actual relationship to each other at all - apart from the one we make with our imagination when we see these patterns.

In around 2500AD we will have a new North Star, called Iota Cephei. If I'm around at that time, I'll ensure I update this post. Until then, I hope this helps!