Page 200 - The Lost Ways

❖ If your watch is set on daylight savings time, use the center point between the
hour hand and the 1:00 mark to determine the north and south line.

Using the Stars

Because the North Star is known to stay fixed, is always visible in a clear night sky (from
the northern hemisphere), and is always pointing north, our ancestors used it for

thousands of years as a guiding star both on land and sea.

Finding the North Star was one of the basic skills all navigators and travelers knew and
used on a regular basis—a skill that has been forgotten by the masses since the invention
of the compass. But unlike the compass, the North Star always points to the TRUE NORTH.
There is no magnetic declination to deal with.

The North Star, which is what we call it today, is actually named Polaris, and surprisingly,
it wasn’t always the North Star and won’t always be:

Thousands of years ago, when the pyramids were rising from the sands of ancient
Egypt, the North Star was an inconspicuous star called Thuban in the constellation
Draco the Dragon. Twelve thousand years from now, the blue-white star Vega in
the constellation Lyra will be a much brighter North Star than our current Polaris.

…So when you’re talking about stars “moving” or staying “fixed,” remember…they
are all moving through the vastness of space. It’s just the relatively short time of
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a human lifespan that prevents us from seeing this grand motion.
One of the easiest ways to find Polaris is by using the group of stars known as the Big
Dipper or the Little Dipper.

Go outside tonight (or now if it’s already night), and try to find one of them first. The Big

Dipper and the Little Dipper are actually the only groups of stars I know how to find, but
I’ve known this since I was a little kid. It’s very easy.

If you find the Big Dipper first, locate the two stars Dubhe and Merak in the outer part of
the Big Dipper’s bowl (see picture). Simply draw an imaginary line from Merak through
Dubhe, and go about five times this distance to find Polaris.

56 Earth Sky (http://earthsky.org)

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