Daily Astronomy Dose

I've been popping over to this sight on occaison for a while now. It comes in very handy for spotting interesting phenomena in the sky late at night when the city-light and clouds are not too enthusiastic in hiding the stars.
I've been dreaming them and watching them for so long that the ideas that I might not be able to see them for the lights of a city makes me feel quite uncomfortable. Even if they still don't look 'quite right' and 'a bit missing' because when I first learnt the sky-map I was in the northern hemisphere and now I live in the southern hemisphere.

It's strange in a way that the southern sky reflects the ground in Australia (I'm sure that other southern hemisphere countries have their own impressions of it, but there they go ...). Ursa Major was the defining star shape in the sky with Polaris sitting in the central axis around which the world swung - it is easy to understand how people could see a flat world being spun around a central axis, generating myths of spinning and trees to explain the world. But down here, for the last part of my life I have been taken with the idea that the Cruxis Australis doesn't actually indicate with starry punctuation where the southern sky-pole is, because the tail is pointing where one has to look. It's the difference between a child being told and a grownup being shown where to look.
I like the conceit that down here the sky considers us watchers adequately sensible to work out where the pole should be from the observations we make.

One day, perhaps, us humans will go out and explore that lacuna in the sky; We will see with our own eyes, risking our own necks to see what is there. Somehow it becomes more real when a fellow human being has seen new things. In the meantime I wll watch the space in the sky and wonder what is out there.