From the book, The Hidden Seasons:
The constellation of Leo the Lion is a good one to know and he’s a friendly and practical character. He’s easy to spot and recognise with nine bright stars that form a shape that tallies with his name and make up the twelfth largest constellation.
The best constellations contain at least one very bright star that helps us pick them out and Leo obliges: Regulus is the twenty-first brightest star in the night sky, which sounds unimpressive until we consider that’s twenty-first out of the six thousand that are visible to the naked eye, in theory. Regulus rises near east north-east and sets west north-west. There is a fairly bright star above Regulus and at Leo’s leading shoulder. It is called Al Geiba, which means ‘lion’s mane’. (There is another way of seeing these leading stars: a backwards question mark, where Regulus is the dot at the bottom. If you see a backwards question mark in the sky, you’re looking at Leo. Nothing else fits that description so neatly.)
Everything about Leo is user-friendly. The stars that form his head are at the western end and his tail is at the eastern, which means he moves ‘forward’, that is, head first. His head rises over the eastern horizon before his rump, and his head leads the way across the southern sky and sets before his tail in the west.
Leo can be seen roaming across the southern sky throughout the spring evenings and are fine times for a lion hunt. Having found him, identify the two stars that form his rump, Zosma and Chertan. Now imagine a line that runs down from Zosma, through Chertan and on down to the ground. When this line is vertical, you are looking south. (Whenever Zosma is high in the sky, you are looking close to south. If Zosma is left of Chertan you are looking east of south, and if it is right of it, you are looking west of south.)
You might also enjoy:
How to Find Your Way Using the Stars
The Hidden Seasons – The Book
