Things I can reliably find: Orion, the Plough, Cassiopeia, and…
Learning the skyPart 4 of 4
Things I can reliably find: Orion, the Plough, Cassiopeia, and Jupiter when it is behaving. Two years, and that is the list.
Everybody starting out expects the sky to resolve into a map. It does not. It resolves into four or five anchors and an enormous amount of context-dependent guessing, and the guessing gets slightly better every clear night, of which there are about nine a year where I live.
The fifth
Working on the Pleiades, which everyone says is easy and which I have now failed to locate confidently on four separate occasions. I can see it. I can never be sure I am seeing it rather than the thing next to it. This is apparently normal and I find that no comfort at all.
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birdie
four anchors and a lot of context-dependent guessing is also how I identify a guitar pedal by ear, and I have been pretending that is expertise for years
lian
the pleiades are genuinely hard, look slightly to the side of them. that is not a metaphor, it is how the eye works in the dark