You know Polaris, of course. It’s also known as the North Star.
If you happen to find yourself in strange and trackless outdoors at night — like at sea, in the desert or on a mountaintop — and you don’t have any compass or GPS or radar beam or gas station from which to get directions, you can at least try to fix your position and best route on a mental or paper map.
To do that, you need to find at least one of the four compass points from where you stand. In the northern skies at night, the easiest to find is the north. That’s where Polaris is located. It floats there at one spot of the sky, almost motionless in a fixed position above the North Pole while the rest of stardom appear to rotate around it as the hours pass by. Continue reading “The night Polaris turned my world upside down”