Looking Up: Saturn and...moon?
I was prompted by one of my cousins to get out my telescope tonight--after seeing a picture of hers on Facebook! I suddenly realized that it had been far too long since I'd gazed at the night sky. Sure it gets dark late now, but the weather is warm and I'm usually up late anyways! The first thing that caught my eye tonight was a star. It wasn't completely dark yet and it was the brightest star I could see from my spot on my back deck. I wasn't sure what it was, and was wondering about it as I admired it through my telescope. I then looked up and saw it's relationship to the Big Dipper and thought I'd go look it up on the computer when I suddenly remembered the memorization trick I wrote about last year: Arc to Arcturus. If you follow the trajectory of the arc of the Big Dipper's handle, you'll land on Arcturus -- which is also hard to miss because of its brightness! And that's definitely what it was. I then I looked down in the sky a little from there to land on this year's favorite: Saturn.