How to Find the North Star to Find North (Northern Hemisphere)

How to find the North Star in the northern hemisphere and find north using the stars and the night sky

Prints
Copied!

👇 Get new sketches each week

The Pole Star or North Star (Polaris) is a navigator’s best friend as it is always due North.

To find it, follow the two stars on the end of the cup in the Big Dipper (or the Plough in the UK)—part of the constellation Ursa Major or Great Bear—to the most prominent star.

The North Star happens to be the last star in the tail of the Little Dipper—the constellation Ursa Minor or the Little Bear. Handy for a navigation sanity check at night.

The North Star is the star that stays fixed in those neat star trail photos in which all the other stars rotate in a circle as the Earth turns.

In the Southern hemisphere, you can use the Southern Cross and the Pointers to find South, but it's not quite as simple as in the North.

Related Ideas to Use the Southern Cross to Find South

Find South with the Southern Cross (Southern Hemisphere)
Redshift
Orbit
Looking Back in Time

I updated this sketch for my book Big Ideas Little Pictures

Published 30 Apr 2015

Get the book!

Big Ideas Little Pictures

Prefer to listen?

Try the podcast

🎉 Sketchplanations is reader supported

Keep exploring

How to find south using the Southern Cross and The Pointers in the Southern hemisphere using the stars and the night sky

Use the Southern Cross to find South (Southern Hemisphere)

Looking back in time as we look to the stars: A visual explanation of how light from the Moon, Sun, stars, and galaxies shows us the past because light takes time to travel.

Looking Back in Time: The Speed of Light and the Night Sky

The Keeling curve

The Union Jack

Seasons

Mercator Projection illustration: shows the consequences of flattening out a spherical globe. Whilst it's a handy exercise for navigating and producing maps, it can inflate the size of land masses the in the north and the south. In a Mercator projection Greenland is comparable in size with Africa. In reality, it's much smaller.

The Mercator projection

Navigating by the stars is both lovely and handy. Unlike the Northern Hemisphere, where you can find Polaris, the North Star, to know which way is north, there's no obvious star that indicates south in the Southern Hemisphere. Instead, you have to use two handy indicators: the Southern Cross—easily spotted, fortunately—and two stars known as The Pointers. Find where these intersect, as in the sketch, and you’ve found due south. Or, if you prefer, you can follow the direction the Southern Cross is pointing for a distance equal to 4.5 times the length of the constellation to arrive at the spot. Incidentally, I wondered about reliable methods of finding south in the Northern Hemisphere and north in the Southern Hemisphere. The simple answer is to find north or south and turn around. Related Ideas to Use the Southern Cross to Find South Find North with the North Star (Northern Hemisphere) Redshift Orbit Looking Back in Time I updated this sketch for my book Big Ideas Little PicturesNavigating by the stars is both lovely and handy. Unlike the Northern Hemisphere, where you can find Polaris, the North Star, to know which way is north, there's no obvious star that indicates south in the Southern Hemisphere. Instead, you have to use two handy indicators: the Southern Cross—easily spotted, fortunately—and two stars known as The Pointers. Find where these intersect, as in the sketch, and you’ve found due south. Or, if you prefer, you can follow the direction the Southern Cross is pointing for a distance equal to 4.5 times the length of the constellation to arrive at the spot. Incidentally, I wondered about reliable methods of finding south in the Northern Hemisphere and north in the Southern Hemisphere. The simple answer is to find north or south and turn around. Related Ideas to Use the Southern Cross to Find South Find North with the North Star (Northern Hemisphere) Redshift Orbit Looking Back in Time I updated this sketch for my book Big Ideas Little Pictures

Newer

RRandom

Older