I know and appreciate the fact there’s many regular readers of this column, and I hope you’ve learned much about the night skies.

I also know we have new readers all the time, so this week I want to go back to the basics; the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper. If you’re just getting started with stargazing, the dippers are a natural launch pad to get your love affair going with the celestial theater.

The Big Dipper is riding high in the northern skies these early spring evenings. You have to wait until around 9:30 p.m. to see the Big Dipper perched upside down just below the overhead zenith. These seven stars are some of the brightest in the sky.

Two stars in the Big Dipper’s pot section opposite the handle, Dubhe and Merak, can point you to Polaris, otherwise known as the North Star. Just draw a line between Merak and Dubhe and continue down.

How far do you go? Extend your clenched fist at arm’s length and three of those fist widths should get you from Merak and Dubhe to the North Star.

Polaris is certainly not the brightest star in the sky, but it sure is an important one. I call it the “Lynch pin” of the night sky because everything in the heavens, even the sun and the moon, completes one complete circle every 24 hours around the North Star.

That’s because the North Star is shining almost directly above the Earth’s North Pole. If you’re standing at North Pole, Polaris would be directly overhead at the zenith, and everything in the celestial sphere would circle it every night and day.

Stars close to Polaris would make tight little circles around it and stars closer to the horizon would make progressively larger circles, but no matter how far or near to Polaris, all stars would make one complete circuit in 24 hours.

Because we don’t live at the North Pole but rather about halfway between the North Pole and equator, Polaris is about halfway between the northern horizon and overhead.

The general rule of thumb is that the altitude of Polaris above your northern horizon equals your degrees in latitude. In the case of the Butler, our latitude is about 41 degrees, so our altitude of Polaris around here is 41 degrees above the northern horizon.

Stars and constellations in our northern sky make such small circles around Polaris that they never get below our horizon. They’re called circumpolar stars, such as the stars of the Big and Little Dippers.

Stars farther south from Polaris have such large circles that as they go around, part of the circle lies below our horizon. That makes most of the stars in our sky rise in the east and set in the west just like the sun and moon.

The North Star is also the brightest star of the Little Dipper, shining at the end of its handle.

The Little Dipper is nearly upright below the Big Dipper and is a lot tougher to see, especially in city lights.

Look for two moderately bright stars to right of Polaris. They’re Kochab and Pherkad, on the opposite side of the Little Dipper’s pot section.

The other two stars in the pot and the other two handle stars can be really tricky to see.

The Little Dipper is also known as Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, and the Big Dipper is actually just the rear end and tail of a much bigger constellation, Ursa Major, the Big Bear.

I’ll show how to find you the rest of Big Bear and tell you quite a bear “tale” in future Skywatch columns.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and is author of the book, “Pennsylvania Starwatch,” available at bookstores and at www.lynchandthestars.com.