Week of Dec. 22-28, 2013

If you've ever quit an evening of stargazing in frustration because you just couldn't find a great bear, an archer, or the winged horse known as Pegasus, take heart. Neither can I.

Unfortunately, some beginning stargazers expect to see such images among the heavens, but this is terribly unrealistic because ... well, let's face it folks ... there are no pictures in the sky.

The fact is that the constellations look no more like their namesakes than the George Washington Bridge looks like the father of our country. The ancients likely used groupings of stars simply to represent important objects, animals and people, not necessarily to resemble them.

What we can see in a dark sky far from city lights, however, are stars — plenty of them — and with some imagination, we can trace simple patterns among them. Astronomers call these asterisms: and some of the easiest to create are simple geometrical figures: triangles, arcs, squares and more.

There's no reason to limit ourselves to stars within individual constellations either; in fact, we can form one of the largest asterisms in all the heavens by using bright stars from no less than six constellations. This appears in our evening sky right now and is called Winter Oval or Winter Hexagonl.

To find it, go outdoors well after dark this week and look toward the southeastern sky. There you should have no difficulty finding the sparkling bluish-white star Sirius sparkling just above the horizon. Sirius marks the ancient constellation of Canis Major, the great dog, but don't worry about that for now; Sirius will simply form the starting point of the Winter Oval.

From Sirius, follow a line to the left until you encounter another fairly bright star: Procyon, part of Canis Minor, the little dog. Then continue left, but begin heading upward; next you'll find two nearly-equally bright stars Pollux and Castor, the main stars in Gemini, the twins. Above these two lies another bright one: Capella in Auriga, the charioteer.

From Capella, slide downward and to the right, until you encounter the reddish-orange star Aldebaran in Taurus. Dropping down even farther you'll find Rigel in Orion, the hunter. Finally you'll return to Sirius, where your journey began.

And inside the Oval — not far from its center — lies another bright star that marks the right shoulder of Orion. This is the red super-giant star known as Betelgeuse.

All totaled, this easy asterism encompasses half of the 18 brightest stars visible to stargazers in the Earth's Northern Hemisphere!

Once you've found the Winter Oval, perhaps you can begin searching the sky for other shapes: geometrical figures, letters of the alphabet, punctuation marks (periods don't count!) and more. By creating your own asterisms among the stars you'll learn the sky more easily than if you depend on ancient images that don't even exist.

And now, as our tiny blue world completes yet another journey around its life-giving star, I'd like to wish each of my readers, fans and friends a very happy Christmas, (belated) Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, Festivus, or whatever gives you joy in this season. I sincerely hope that your stars shine ever more brightly in 2014!

Visit Dennis Mammana at www.dennismammana.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.