Limiting Magnitude triangles!

I remember these from...high school? Hadn't done much with them, and I won't tonight, but foggy nights are good for organization and theory, I suppose.

Establishing limited magnitude.

A Bad Night of Stargazing Beats a Good Day At Work

Got out tonight about 11:30; clear skies in large chunks but definitely a frustrating evening. Canopus might have been above the horizon but fog banks rendered it pretty invisible. I might have been able to get as close as tau Puppis. Oh well. Could definitely resolve most if not all of Puppis and gamma Velorum to boot, so a good swath of the summer sky extending east towards Hydra and west towards what I presume to have been the vicinity of Caelum and Pictor? Anyway. Praesepe in Cancer was right overhead but nigh-impossible to resolve with my binoculars, Andromeda was fuzzy and indistinct, M79 was utterly elusive although I think I know where to look, Arcturus was hidden in fog over West Cliff though it might be out now...

Still, I suppose it to be a victory that I knew exactly where all of these things should have been; my "global" knowledge seems not to have suffered in a weather-and-sickness-related lapse in stargazing...

[Edit: ooo, and apparently that was Saturn rising in Virgo. Good to know.]

Meta-Monday

Good New Year's so far; housemates and dogs filtering back into the house, so much sun it's not even funny, and even daily reading and writing, which had eluded me for a little while.

And dorky cephalopod evolutionary poetry. Where else would I put this?