so I wrote a long reply in a thread on someone else's post

And I thought the long reply I made on someone else's post might make a good post. It's a story to explain how I got so good at identifying northern constellations by naked eye, especially in a sky that is a little bit light-polluted, but not too much so (because that's the environment in which I learned the constellations--finding them in a truly dark sky full of unfamiliar stars is actually more difficult for me than finding the bright ones, the only ones that are visible, in a city sky).

So when I was in second or third grade, I seem to have attained an understanding of inertia with regard to angular momentum. I knew the Earth spun (and pretty much everything else spins) because it's spinning in the first place, and very difficult to stop. But I kept pestering my elementary school teacher with questions about what started it spinning in the first place. (Nowadays, I'd ask, where did the conserved angular momentum come from, and I'm pretty sure that's cosmology and maybe even involves quantum spin, but quadong would know better than I about the latter.)

At the time I lived in Elgin, home of the Elgin Observatory built by the old watch factory, which observatory was at the time owned by school district U-46. So my teacher, or someone at school, suggested I address my question in a letter to Charles Tuttle, the then director of the observatory. I did so (my mom typed it up for me). I don't remember his answer, but I was invited to take after-school classes in astronomy there, which I did during third and fourth grade. We ground mirror-blanks for telescopes, and studied constellations in the planetarium. Now, planetarium constellations are not quite as fascinating to the unlearned as real constellations, and when test-time came, I found that I could only identify Orion and (oddly?) Delphinus. I found this bad test performance humiliating, and that's whence my motivation came in the 1990s when I spent a lot of time outdoors at night studying real constellations.

Now I know the northern constellations so well that the first item on my bucket list is a long stargazing trip to the southern hemisphere, so that I can learn the southern sky as well. I'm mostly a naked-eye and binoculars person, the same way jiawen is such a magnificent telescope and astrophotography person.