Photography

I've memorized a list of the 35 brightest stars. I look at the night sky 3 or 4 times a night when it's not too cloudy and identify what stars and planets I can. I enjoy the progression of the sky -- about an hour of progress every 2 weeks (so for example the sky at 10pm one night looks like the sky at 11pm 2 weeks ago).

I just saw Procyon for the first time in 8 months or so when I got up this morning.

In the pre-dawn sky I love how Jupiter is between Aldebaran and Elnath (one of Taurus the bull's horns) , and Mars in between Alhena (Gemini's brighter foot) and Elnath.

My main guide is --

https://in-the-sky.org/skymap2.php

UNcheck the box "Deep Sky" below the sky map as that clutters things up with stuff most people can't see without binoculars at least.

For an alternate "planetarium view": . Pull down "Charts" from the top black menu bar, and pick Planetarium. Or go to this link:

https://in-the-sky.org/skymap.php

Then scroll out some to zoom out until the horizon appears, then zoom out some more. Then hold the mouse button down while rotating things to where "E" is at the bottom center.

Click on the "Deep Sky" checkbox below the map on the left to uncheck it and get rid of all the clutter.

Edited to add There's a pulldown to change what stars one sees as far as brightness: bright, intermediate, and faint. My setting is bright as I can't see anything but the bright stars, and not all of them. The other thing is this setting is hard to find -- one finds it by first clicking the Change Time box to the right of the chart.