[some clever name]

Death and Life, 1910

I recently learned how to find North using the sky, and it turns out to be so easy that I feel stupid for not learning much earlier. Perhaps you would like to learn too! It could save your life in some unlikely scenario, I guess, but actually in everyday situations it's just pretty handy to be able to look at the sky for a couple of seconds and tell which direction you're facing.

I’m not any kind of expert at this, I just learned how to do it recently. I don’t know the proper names for things, and lots of the things I say are going to be technically not quite correct. But I’m not trying to teach astronomy, I just want to quickly find which way I’m facing, and these simplifications work very well for that.

Also, this whole thing will assume you're at a moderate northern latitude, which you very likely are if you’re in Europe or the USA.

How to start

Say you’ve got a clear night with a half moon in the sky.

Getting a rough direction with the Moon is extremely easy - all you need to know is that the terminator (the line between light and dark) points south. So you just take that terminator line and mentally extend it down to where it hits the horizon, and that's approximately South.

That’s close enough for the girls I go out with.

If it’s not a perfect half moon, so the terminator line isn't straight, you just kind of take the direction that the curved line is facing, overall. You basically want the tangent at the middle of the terminator. Or if you prefer, you can draw the line connecting the top and the bottom of the terminator, which ends up being the same angle. These images show both options:

With a crescent moon this is even easier, you can just take the line between the “tips of the horns” of the crescent.

Extend that line down to the horizon, and that’s approximately South.

Now, if the moon is very low in the sky, so the terminator is at a steep angle, then this method will be extra inaccurate. But that's ok, because if the moon is that low, you don't really need to trace the terminator line to find south, because you know that the Moon just rose or is about to set, so the moon itself is basically East or basically West, and you can tell which by looking at the terminator.

If that doesn’t feel obvious, that’s perhaps to be expected, and I should tell you about The Ecliptic.

Basically all the big stuff in the solar system is always on more or less the same plane. So the Sun, the Moon, and all the planets are always found close to a single line, which crosses the sky from East to West. If you’re near the equator it goes almost straight overhead, but at moderate northern latitudes, like you probably live at, it’s tilted over pretty far to the south. So the Sun and the Moon will rise more or less due East, be more or less due South at their highest point, and set more or less due West.

That means if the Moon is just above the horizon, like in this example, we can look at the angle of the terminator and see it’s tilted way over to the right, so we know South is to our left, and the Moon must be about to set in the West.

(In fact I got this from sky visualisation software, so it’s helpfully showing us where West is anyway)

Another way to think about this is: The Moon moves through the sky in a direction roughly perpendicular to the terminator. So we can take our terminator line and draw a line at right angles to that, and that’s roughly the path the Moon is travelling along:

We can follow that line to the horizon and see where the Moon will set, i.e. basically due West. So the Moon’s terminator points South, and kind of acts like the vertical line of a T shape, with the arms of the T pointing towards East and West.

Hopefully you can convince yourself that all this makes sense by thinking about shining lights on basketballs and so on, but you can also just use the method without being able to visualise clearly why it works.

All of this is approximate and simplified - the Moon’s orbit is actually 5 degrees off the Ecliptic, and the Ecliptic is 23 degrees off the Celestial Equator, and so on. None of it really lines up and you’ll often be off by like 40 degrees, but I don’t care. This method is extremely quick and it's usually good enough, especially in cities laid out on a grid, where you only need to get it to within 90 degrees.

And if you want more accuracy, this is still a good thing to start with, because if you can quickly find roughly-South, that makes it much quicker and easier to look roughly-North and locate the stars necessary to pin down exactly-North.

What about the daytime?

Since the Sun follows basically the same path as the Moon, you can also get rough orientation from its location. If it’s low in the sky, it just rose or is just about to set, so you know it’s East or West. You can’t tell which by looking at the Sun itself, since it doesn’t have a neat terminator line like the Moon (and you shouldn’t really look at it anyway), but the neat thing about the Sun is that, unlike the Moon, it always rises in the morning (East) and sets in the evening (West). If it’s the middle of the day it’ll be to the South.

But also, don’t forget about the Moon during daytime! It’s often out during the day. And in fact, it’s often not out at night! Or sometimes it’s out, but it’s Full or New and you don’t have a terminator line to use. You can’t rely on just the Moon, even for coarse orientation. So let’s talk about stars.

Bold Orion, Mighty Hunter

Orion is a lovely constellation that’s very distinctive and easy to spot, and you can use it to find roughly-South very quickly, just like you can with the Moon.

He’s meant to be a hunter, with a belt of three stars, and a sword hanging from it. You had to make your own fun, back in those days.

It’s a sword, ok? He has a sword on his belt.

The point is, the sword points South just like the Moon’s terminator line does. So if you can’t see the Moon, maybe you can use Orion’s sword.

Now we have two ways to quickly find roughly-South, and therefore roughly-North. Let’s get more accurate.

The North Star

The sky provides us with an improbably convenient star called Polaris, which we call The North Star, because it’s almost perfectly over the North Pole.

This location is unique, in that it makes Polaris essentially the single static point that the whole rest of the sky rotates around. For a given latitude on Earth, Polaris is always exactly the same height above the horizon, in exactly the same direction, and that direction is North, to within less than a degree.

It’s also really bright for its region of the sky - there’s no brighter star within like 30 degrees of it.

Polaris is so extremely convenient that I consider it to be (very weak) evidence of a loving god. Finding the exact strength of that evidence, in bits, is left as an exercise for the reader.

So Polaris is an A+ gold star, now all we need is a way to find it.

First off, because it’s always at exactly the same height above the horizon, once you’ve found it a few times it gets easier, because you know where it is vertically. If you’ve also used the Moon or Orion to narrow your search down to like a quarter of the sky horizontally, you can often spot Polaris very quickly.

But it helps a lot to be able to find it using constellations.

Ursa Major

This is the one everyone knows, the Big Bear. People also call it The Big Dipper, The Drinking Gourd, Big Spoon Energy, or The Plough.

Here’s an image from WaddenSky:

To find Polaris, you find the Big Dipper, take the line between the two stars on the end, and extend that line up by about 5 times its length, and there’s Polaris. Easy enough.

The main thing that can make this tricky is, as I said, Polaris is the fixed spot that the whole night sky rotates around, so the Big Dipper could be dipping bigly all over the place. It could be like it’s shown there, it could be almost directly overhead and upside down, it could even be partly below the horizon, and invisible behind the trees:

So, you don’t want to put all your eggs in the Big Frying Pan.

Cassiopeia

Cassiopeia is basically just as good as The Big Dipper when it comes to finding Polaris. She looks like a big M, or a big 3, or W, or E (Σ, really), depending on what orientation she feels like right now. And the nice thing about her is, she’s on pretty much the opposite side from The Big Dipper, so if you can’t see one, you can see the other. Learn how to spot both, and you’re set.

To find Polaris from Cassiopeia, you basically draw a line between the two ends of the zigzag, and make a right triangle twice as long, from the bottom of the 3 (or the right side of the M, and so on).

That’s really all there is to it: find roughly-South using the Moon or Orion, use that to look roughly-North until you either see Polaris itself, or find it using Ursa Major or Cassiopeia, and now you’ve got North to within one degree. Usually takes something like 5 seconds.

And there you have it! Now you can find your bearings quickly and easily using just the sky, no matter what!

Unfortunately, the older couple’s sole methodology for recruiting the committee was “posting on their facebook page.”

Unsurprisingly, as people aren’t really on Facebook, and the algorithm wasn’t interested, this was strangely ineffective.

After trying nothing and being all out of ideas, a couple announced - to national news coverage, and a national audience - that the festival was cancelled forever, due to the impossibility of getting any volunteers. Thousands of people may have enjoyed the festival, but nobody had met their cries for help, so here are the consequences.

This was immediately met with consternation, confusion, surprise, and offers of help, but understandably, the couple felt they had done more than enough for free for many years, and were burnt out. Where were you lazy bastards when we NEEDED the help? Of course you care NOW. And obviously it’s too late now.

Now, people on tumblr should spot the problem more readily.

Had they advertised locally, with flyers and posters in shops, as the festival itself was advertised? (No.)

Had they used their proven organisation skills to make recruitment a Thing - “Save the festival! If we don’t get 3 more volunteers in 3 months it stops forever. Come to our information session in the library to learn how you can help!” (Why would you, when there’s Facebook?)

Have they asked for any help from other organisations? Local communities? Were they looped in to PTAs, folk societies, allotment committees, or any other bloody committees that are usually full of people who want to be on more committees? (And who often aren’t on Facebook. Young parents increasingly aren’t.) Had they asked anyone beyond their immediate Facebook friends to help spread the word? (No.)

Had they communicated with interested people - friends and attendees of the audience - with a newsletter? No.

Did they think about widening the recruitment net to neighbouring towns and villages? Did they post on charity job websites that recruit unpaid committee members for this purpose? (No.)

Had they leveraged their hundreds of contacts, of all the performers/vendors/artists of the festival? (“Hey guys, if we don’t get 5 people to help out in the next 3 months, the event is cancelled forever. Do you know anyone? It’s 5 hours of work a month and they don’t need to be local.”) that seems like an easy win, but apparently not.The news coverage - the media contacts? No.

Literally the first that the “regular” community heard of it was the algorithm-boosted Facebook announcement of it being cancelled… news which spread …. by word of mouth ….and news coverage.

Now, I think personally that they’re simply a lovely couple who probably, subconsciously, didn’t really WANT to let it go - to cede control to strangers. I think they realised they didn’t want to have to share the festival, to be bossed about by a committee of pompous committee-joining weirdos. It would have gone beyond their control and intentions in a year; that’s the nature of things; out of their hands entirely in two years; they’d probably be pushed out in three years. In that honourable retirement they’d have to watch the festival becoming ever-more-different, and everyone forgetting them. It’s probably quite a pleasing way to say goodbye, with everyone expressing their disappointment and regret and admiring them for their legacy. I think that intelligent people who wanted to try would’ve spotted the problems here, even if they aren’t technologically savvy.

okay okay one more quiz, this is your American Christian denomination based on your taste in secular things and get ready because I got dead on bullseye Episcopalian LMAO

i get so irritated with the nephites, and it disturbs my spirit to read what some of them have written about the lamanite people. and i don't believe their point of view sometimes.

i think the book of mormon ultimately condemns the nephites' sinful behavior, but that is a message i think many people miss.

i have a soft spot for zoram and the zoramites as well. zoram didn't ask to be involved in all that, and didn't have a real choice about going with nephi and his family (he was coerced on threatof death). the zoramites have a right to be upset about it. my people were brought to the americas against our will as well, and i just feel the zoramites justifiable anger deeply. and while their way of worship needs correction, it feels like a "White people stepping in to save Black folks from their ignorance" narrative (which is a racist white savior narrative). i'm not sure i believe how the nephites presented zoram's point of view and the zoramites either.

since the BoM is written from a nephite point of view, i think it contains the prejudices that the nephites have. i guess i'm "nephite critical," but i think that's okay.