Join the dots
Hi all, I’m up at the telescopes again. It’s 3am and I’m trying to avoid doing some science, which would send me to sleep.
In between starting the observations I’m trying to learn some stars in the southern sky, so that when someone says “oh, you’re an astronomer, show me a constellation” I don’t have to look for Orion every time, especially as he is standing on his head and goes to bed just after sunset! The sky here is fantastic, as you’d expect, but the constellations I’ve seen are rather naff. At the moment I can see:
The imaginitively named southern cross, kind of small and cross like. 10 points.
Corvus - better name, but it’s basically a random quadrilateral. It could be any four stars in the sky. One point.
Triangulum australe …. no comment, no points (well 3 actually)
So my conclusion is that the southern folk are distinctly lacking in dot-to-dot skills. On the other hand the milky way is incredible, and I can see both the magallenic clouds (nearby galaxies which look, surprisingly enough, like small clouds), so it’s still pretty awesome.