Friday- Janurary 5th, 2007 Observations

With the use of a new tool my dad got for identifying constelations, Giancarlo and I made some great observations on Friday. The easiest constellation to find in the Winter sky is Orion, so, having located that, we proceeded to use the winter star chart to find nearby constellations. I was easily able to locate Canis Minor, and then thanks to Canis Major's 1st magnitude star we located that. Gemini was our next stop, though we had some trouble making out the stars of puppis, since it was at the southern horizon. Perseus and Andromeda were still up, so we saw those. Perseus was easy to see, but I couldn't make out Andromeda too well. GC also pointed out the Pleides, and I found Polaris, of Ursa Minor.
When messing around with the search function, we tried looking for some planets. Venus was apparently in the water (we were out on the dock).