With my new found knowledge of constellations, their names, and locations, I tried to take my little sister out stargazing.

Unfortunately, there are a couple problems with that:

1) If you have the maps app that comes on an iPhone, switch the map setting to satellite. You should see the globe, and if you zoom out, you can see where it's night and how lit the continents are.

You see the that huge section of bright lights in the southeastern portion of Michigan?

Yeah that's where I live.

Aka there's a lot of light pollution.

2) You'll never hear me say this again, but Ohio did one thing right when they removed all their trees; you can actually see the horizon.

Yeah you can't do that here.

Trees, coupled with houses and businesses as far as the eye can see, makes it impossible to find some of the zodiac constellations, like Sagittarius and Pisces.

On top of that, it was partly cloudy, so I could only point out the Big Dipper part of Ursa Major and Polaris. Ursa Minor and Draco couldn't be seen due to light pollution. I couldn't see Cepheus or Cassiopeia because trees.

So, Alexis looks up and points and goes, "What's that star?"

So I look up and I see how bright the star is, and I go, "Oh, that's probably part of the Summer Triangle (the three brightest stars in the sky during the summer)".

I pull out my phone and scan it with my astronomy app.

IT WAS VEGA

WHICH IS PART OF THE CONSTELLATION LYRA

AND IS ALSO PART OF THE SUMMER TRIANGLE

So I put my phone down and I look south and I see another bright star, and then other one to the east, and I'm like, "Those two have to be Altair and Deneb."

AND THEY WERE

EXACTLY WHAT I CALLED

And the cool thing was, once I found Deneb, I could actually faintly see Cygnus the Swan, so I pointed out to Alexis and she was so amazed.

I wish I lived in Farmington or something they probably have a better view there but it still made me feel better.