Follow up on LST

A recent alum was reading my post on local sidereal time and mentioned something rather cool.  Apparently, the constellation Cassiopeia, the constellation that looks like this:

 

has a right ascension of about 0 hours.  For those of you without an astronomy background, right ascension is one of the coordinates astronomers use to describe the position of the stars.  It is sort of like longitude, except it measures how far east a star is in comparison to where the sun is during the vernal equinox instead of using the Prime Meridian.  Since local sidereal time describes which right ascension is overhead at a specific time, we know that when Cassiopeia is directly overhead and forming an 'M' the LST is 00:00.  When Cassiopeia is a 'W' the LST is 12:00.  When Cassiopeia is directly left of Polaris (the North star), the LST is 6:00 and when it is to the right of Polaris, the LST is 18:00.  So if you're ever walking around at night and wondering if an object with a certain right ascension will be visible (and the declination isn't an issue) and you can find Cassiopeia, then you may be able to tell how close to your meridian the object you are looking for is.

Thanks to http://stargazer2010.files.wordpress.com for the picture and Joe A. for the information.