Five Easy Constellations to Find on Your First Night Out

You don't need a telescope, an app, or a dark-sky park to start stargazing. You need a clear night, ten minutes for your eyes to adjust, and a few shapes to look for. Once you can find one constellation, it points the way to the next.

These five are the easiest for beginners in the Northern Hemisphere. They're bright, distinctive, and between them they cover every season.

Before you start

• Give your eyes 10–15 minutes. Night vision builds slowly, and one glance at a bright phone screen resets it.
• Use a red light if you need to read anything. Red disturbs dark adaptation the least.
• Start from somewhere dark-ish. A back garden away from streetlights is enough for all five of these.

1. Orion, the Hunter (winter evenings)

If you learn only one constellation, learn Orion. Look for three bright stars in a short, straight row: Orion's Belt. Around them sit four bright stars in a rough rectangle: his shoulders and knees.

• Betelgeuse (top left, as seen from the north) glows orange-red. It's a red supergiant.
• Rigel (bottom right) is a brilliant blue-white.
• Below the belt hangs a fainter line of "stars": Orion's Sword. The fuzzy middle one is the Orion Nebula, a stellar nursery you can see with plain eyes from a dark site.

Star-hop: follow the belt down and to the left to reach Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

2. The Big Dipper (all year, best in spring)

Seven stars shaped like a ladle or a saucepan. Strictly speaking, the Big Dipper is an asterism, a familiar pattern inside a larger constellation, Ursa Major, the Great Bear. In the UK it's often called the Plough.

From much of the Northern Hemisphere it never sets, so you can find it on any clear night. It just swings around the sky over the seasons.

Star-hop: take the two stars at the end of the "bowl" (Dubhe and Merak, the Pointers). Draw a line through them and extend it about five times their distance apart. You'll arrive at Polaris, the North Star.

3. Cassiopeia, the Queen (autumn, but all year)

On the opposite side of Polaris from the Big Dipper sits a bright W (or M, depending on the time of night). That's Cassiopeia. Like the Dipper, it circles the pole and stays up all night from mid-northern latitudes.

The Big Dipper and Cassiopeia work like a see-saw around Polaris: when one is high, the other is low.

4. The Summer Triangle (summer and early autumn)

Three bright stars from three different constellations form a huge triangle overhead on summer nights:

• Vega in Lyra, the brightest of the three
• Deneb in Cygnus, the Swan
• Altair in Aquila, the Eagle

From a dark site, the faint band of the Milky Way runs right through the triangle.

5. Scorpius (summer, low in the south)

Low on the southern horizon in summer, look for a curving line of stars with a hook at the end: the Scorpion's tail. At its heart is Antares, a red supergiant whose name means roughly "rival of Mars" for its colour.

Scorpius is one of the few constellations that really looks like its name. It's also one of the zodiac constellations (more on those in our guide to the twelve zodiac constellations).

Make a star map of your own

A lovely way to remember a constellation is to make it. Prick the stars through dark card with a pin and hold it up to a lamp, or stick star stickers onto navy paper and join them with a white pencil.

In Paper Worlds, the Outer Space world includes scenes for Orion, the seven stars of the Big Dipper, and the zodiac, each built as a paper scene you place yourself. Building the shape in paper turns out to be a very good way to recognise it the next time you're out under the real thing.

Clear skies.