(This blog is a rehash of a blog I wrote in December of 2010)
This image is edited from a Stellarium screenshot. Stellarium is an excellent, free, planetarium program. Click for a larger view.
As a little boy I was lucky to spend summers under dark skies, and I had parents that helped me learn the constellations and movement of the nighttime skies. Winter skies, of course, take more effort to observe, but the reward is worth the bundling up. The "Winter Hexagon" is easy to know, and serves as great guide to the nighttime winter sky."Orion's Belt", part of the constellation Orion, is a well known and easily recognized asterism in the northern hemisphere's winter sky (between Betelgeuse and Rigel on the image above). Six bright stars surround Orion's belt forming the Winter Hexagon, outlined in the image above. Those stars are easy to find on a dark, clear night - follow the line formed by Orion's Belt down to the left to locate the bright and twinkling star Sirius, drop down perpendicular to the Belt to find blue-white Rigel, follow the line of the belt up to the right to spot Aldebaran (the orange "eye of the bull" in the constellation Taurus). Look up from Aldebaran to find Capella (in the constellation Auriga), to the left of Capella find Pollux (the brighter of the twins of Gemini), and the sixth star of the hexagon is Procyon, below Pollux on the way back to Sirius. The bright orange star perpendicular to and up from Orion's belt (about as far above the belt as Rigel is below it) is the "red giant" Betelgeuse, the brightest star within the hexagon.
The Moon passes through the Winter Hexagon from right to left (west to east) each month...this month (January, 2019) it will cross the hexagon on the nights of 1/17, 1/18, and 1/19.
