Star-hopping a way home for a superman; astronomers needed

[snorkack]

So, nobody's too impressed with my OP scenario using stars? Y'all have some great ideas, but the protag is... well, before he manifested he was a starving actor. Limited, IOW, with regard to most things involving geometry and trig.

My reasoning is that stars are lots of indistinguishable white dots. For naked eye and full sphere sky, about 5000 of them.

Nebulae are rather fewer and somewhat more distinctive:
galaxies - 3 or 4 (Magellanic Clouds, Andromeda, with good vision Triangulum)
globular clusters - 2 or 3 (Omega Centauri, 47 Tucanae, with good vision Hercules)
diffuse nebulae - I think 2 or 3 (Carina, Orion, maybe Lagoon)
supernova remnants - 0
planetary nebulae - 0
unresolved open clusters - not quite sure but guessing 10...20

Still, over 100 times fewer than stars. And unlike stars which are pure dots, nebulae have a bit more distinctive traits, like surface luminosity, shape... Easier to do memorizing and elimination.

If so, what does the protagonist do from there?

Orion?
I suggest two things:
try to identify and use the triangle of Orion´s Belt (Alnilam is luckily far behind the other two)
look for Taurean Pleiades.

 

[chasrob]

News http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1112863504/earth-solar-system-on-spiral-arm-060313/ Relevant to my story. The sun is not on a spur, but perhaps a major arm of the galaxy, extending over to the Perseus Arm, not the Sagittarius. Using the star-hopping method, it should be easier to locate our star's neighborhood.