Via lifehacker:
Don't believe that part about where Jupiter is. As far as I know, the planets move .... (which is why they are called planets, yes?)
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"I have departed from this planet and I have left behind my poor earthly ones with their occupations which are as many as they are useless; at last I am living in the scintillating splendor of the stars, each of which used to seem to me as large as millions of suns." -Jules Massenet
Each star in…
"There's nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you."
-Woody Hayes
There's no doubt that we lucked out when it came to the formation of our Solar System.
Image credit: Michael Pidwirny, retrieved from cosmosportal.org.
Our inner Solar System, where temperatures are…
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei
While practically every scientist (and 79% of Americans) accept that the Earth and the other planets go around the Sun, it isn't quite…
My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles.
--Children everywhere, up until very recently
Taking a look at the new ring discovered around Saturn made me realize something. Most of us don't realize how full of crap our Solar System is.
I don't mean planets, or moons, or comets or asteroids…
Another correction: Polaris is the way to find North, yes, but isn't even close to being the brightest star in the sky. That's Sirius. At least three stars in Orion (Betelgeuse, Rigel, and Bellatrix) are brighter than Polaris.
In fact, Polaris is listed 48th in this Wikipedia article.
This video is really bad; it reminds me of the kind of answers my astronomy students would give when they hadn't studied their notes. He says a bunch of stuff that's irrelevant to navigating by the stars (all the Orion stuff), making a bunch of mistakes on the way, then gives a confusing answer that he'll later argue is technically correct, at least if he's a pre-med.
The Jupiter bit is really garbled. Not only do the planets move, as Greg said, but the planets farther from the Sun than Earth, including Jupiter, don't show phases; the bright side is always facing toward the Earth (that is, toward the Sun.)
His method of finding North works, but is unnecessarily complicated. All you have to do to point north is stand up straight, and point yourself towards Polaris. That's north.
A real video on how to navigate by the stars would point out Polaris, but would also tell you about how to find your latitude by the ecliptic and your longitude by timing (for example) sunrise, and probably some other tricks I don't know about.