Winter Hexagon

I really should have started with this one if I'd been planning this in any form, since the asterism known as the Winter Hexagon (or, alternately, the Winter Circle, I believe) is the key to the late-fall to early-spring skies.

Fortunately for the part of me that's lazy, the Winter Hexagon is relatively well-known, so people with much better production values throw together jpeg overlays.

I like this site this site Betelgeuse's misspelling aside. (And Saturn's not there at the moment either.

Southern skies in the evening. It's too big to be taken in at once--when Sirius is low in the sky, Capella will be reasonably overhead. Once you get the knack of it, you can start using it to locate some of the smaller constellations in the winter sky! Like those ones I already mentioned! Plus, it's got seven of the twenty brightest stars in the sky, so it sticks out a lot better than Lepus' ears.