Star-hopping

Steve Tonkin explains an easy technique to navigate your way around the night sky

- Steve Tonkin

If you're a newcomer to the wonderful hobby of astronomy, your first time under a clear sky can be an overwhelming experience. How will you ever find your way around this vast number of stars?

Fortunately, there's a tried and tested method, developed over millennia, to turn this bewildering confusion of bright dots into a familiar recreation ground, and which works in bright and dark skies alike. It's called star-hopping.

What we do is make easily identifiable patterns (called asterisms) from the brightest stars and use these as jumping-off points to locate our desired target objects, and we estimate directions in relation to other stars - for example, "towards that bright yellowish star".

Estimating distances works in much the same way - for example "a third of the way from the lower star to the upper one" or a proportion of the field of view of your binoculars or telescope. Alternatively, if you stretch out your arm, you can use the distance covered by your fist or handspan to measure out the distance (most of us are more or less similarly proportioned for this purpose). Let's look at four star-hops to help test your skills.

Star-hop your way to the Pole Star