NavList:

Frank, you say...

"Murray, I'm impressed that you actually can do this --checking local time by looking at the Dipper-- without looking it up."

Actually the story is not exciting, and no great skill in involved, but may be fun to share - and goes back to childhood.

I grew up in New Zealand.  As a young kid interested in science, the Big Dipper (I knew it as The Plough) and Polaris featured in the northern hemisphere reading material I consumed as a kid - but I never got to see Polaris.  I couldn't see The Plough (just bits of it sometimes).  Yet I had read about this fascinating (to me as a kid) idea of a clock in the skies that used Polaris and the Plough.

When I moved to the U.K as a young adult, one of the first things I did on a (rare) clear night (by then a sailor and navigator) was look at the sky and check out these things I had read about but never seen.  Anybody who sails at night looks at the sky.  Years later I became interested in taking photographs at night, so had more reasons to look at what was happening over time.  These days I get to spend most of my time in a rural location against Puget Sound, on a hilltop with an uninterrupted view of the sky in almost every direction - or when I can, out on my boat.  We have plenty of light pollution (Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia and Bremerton), but Polaris and the Big Dipper are clearly visible.  The only things that disuades you from stepping outside to look at the sky are the mosquitos in the summer and the cold in the winter.  At 47 degrees north, Polaris sits coveniently in view of the window above my kitchen sink.  Again, a clear sky is somewhat rare from October to February - but they do happen.

Being a bear of very little brain,  all I need to remember is that the two stars at the end of the pot (I don't even need to remember their names) are over Polaris at midnight in mid-March and under it at midnight in mid-September.  Adjust for daylight savings time (both of these dates now fall into Summer Time in most U.S. states) and don't worry too much about how far east or west one is within a time zone (because my brain would hurt).  From there I can work the rest out.  This works for Washington and it works for Massachussets.  And it worked for London and the English Channel and Irish Sea.  For locations where the Big Dipper falls below the horizon at times one would need to modify this a little (El Paso - I'm looking at you).  One would also need to recalibrate if at the far eastern or far western end of certain time zones (El Paso again), but once the calibartion is done, you are good to go.