[Jan 2007] Know any of the Winter Hexagon stars .. or at least Orion..?

So this is taken from an email back in 2007 to a friend  who was enthused to learn something about the stars of the sky, so i sent her some info, which hopefully others will also enjoy learning about if unfamiliar with it from before.

To me, knowing the stars a bit makes the whole night sky much more "friendly" to me.  Just knowing that my entire life, those same stars will be up there, wherever i am on the Earth, and all i have to do is look up and i can see light from stars coming to me from 10 or 20 or 50 or thousands of
years ago, is kind of comforting, in some deep way, to me.

I personally think it's kind of cool, and just enjoy learning and knowing about this aspect of the natural world around us -- after all, the hemisphere above is half of what you see when you're
outside!

Enjoy, and if this leads anyone else to know any of the stars that are up in the Winter night sky, i'd by most cheered to hear about it.. :-)

-M

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hi Arden- Ok, this is the really cool free program i told you about, totally easy to download and install, and they have Mac, Windows and Linux versions:

  http://www.stellarium.org/


and here's a good site where you can download the pdf and see all the stars:

  http://www.midnightkite.com/starcharts.html


Now specifically for the Winter Hexagon, i found several good sites:

- This shows the configuration and describes some of the mythology of the
constellations involved:

  http://homepage.mac.com/kvmagruder/bcp/aster/constellations/win6.htm

- This shows you more realistically what it will look like in the night sky if you check it out..  but the real sky will look probably still very different to you than this (it does to me):

  http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap021106.html

- This one's interesting, has kind of a 'spiritual' interpretation of it all:

  http://www.souledout.org/nightsky/winterhexagon/winterhexagon.html

- And this is a few year old article that describes it from a newspaper-type perspective, has some good info (of course, the planets move, so ignore all the stuff about them):

  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3812467/

That's a start -- there's a whole lot more, but just get out there and see
if you can identify all 6 stars in the Hexagon, and then we'll talk some
more! :-)

-M