Orion's Belt and one of the best places for looking up

Orion's Belt is a winter pleasure if you live in the Northern Hemisphere. These stars that tell the tale of the hunter Orion, the love object of Artemis, Apollo's twin sister, are fairly easy to pick out once someone has shown you where to look.

Over at Jaunted, Kitts Peak National Observatory at Tohono O'odham Reservation in Arizona is given a heads up as being one fantastic place to see the night sky. The reservation is surrounded by desert, thus has one of the ingredients necessary for stellar star-gazing. No city lights.

Instead, there is a vast sky and a well-organized observatory where the experience is not just a matter of peering in a telescope to see what's up there up close, but a lesson in how to read star charts and use binoculars to star-gaze as well. Since it's an hour out of Tuscon, the included boxed dinner is a nice touch. The telescopes are powerful enough to see planets. If you go, one thing to check out is the Advanced Optical Program where you can take CCD images of what you see up there with the observatory's equipment. [Click here for images.]

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