Setting Moon and Celestial South

The moon is setting finally! We will have nice dark skies again for a couple weeks before we will enter astronomical twilight again (still very dark but the sun is slowly creeping back). I don't particularly want the sun to come back, the sky is just so amazing when it is gone... who wants boring old blue 24/7 when you could walk to work in this?

 

The brightest, left most star in the picture above is actually Saturn.The only planet you can see from the south pole this year.

 This picture is with the camera pointed pretty much straight up from the roof of ARO. Milky Way, South Cross and Alpha and Beta Centauri on the left, small and large Magellanic Clouds and lasers on the right.

If you ever are in the southern hemisphere and need to find South this is how you find it. Draw a line from the long end of the Southern Cross's kite shape and draw a line that perpendicularly bisects Alpha and Beta Centauri and where the lines intersect is the celestial South Pole, the point in the southern sky that does not move. (Conveniently straight up.) It's a little easier in the North because there is an actual star that happens to be at that location, the north is just got lucky.