Start where everyone starts — Orion — but use it as a corner rather than a destination. Rigel, the blue-white foot, magnitude 0.18, is the Hexagon's south-western corner. The first side runs 23.7° south-east to Sirius.
Sirius, magnitude −1.44, is the brightest star in the night sky and the only one here that is genuinely close: 8.6 light-years. It has a white dwarf companion of almost exactly one solar mass squeezed into an Earth-sized body, 10 arcseconds away and ten thousand times fainter — the reason Sirius wobbled for decades before anyone could see why. Next corner: 25.7° north-east.
Procyon at 11.5 light-years — the eighth-nearest star system, and it too has a white dwarf. Sirius and Procyon are both "Dog Stars" and both have dead companions, which is a coincidence but a memorable one. Turn north: 22.9° to the twins.
Pollux (1.16) is the Hexagon's corner, not Castor. They are 4.5° apart and worth comparing: Pollux is a single orange giant 34 light-years away with a confirmed planet; Castor is a knot of six stars — three spectroscopic binaries bound together — at 51 light-years. Pollux is the brighter despite being labelled β, which is Bayer's most famous mistake.
West 34.2° — the Hexagon's longest side — to Capella, magnitude 0.08, which passes almost overhead from 40°N. It looks like one yellow star and is two yellow giants orbiting each other every 104 days, close enough that no telescope will ever split them. Together they put out 150 Suns from 43 light-years.
South 30.7° to Aldebaran, the red eye of the Bull, 65 light-years away and 44 times the Sun's diameter. From here it is 26.5° back to Rigel and the ring is closed. Six corners, six constellations, and you can confirm the whole thing by running Orion's Belt north-west: it points straight at Aldebaran.
The complete figure: 1,940 square degrees, which is a tenth of the 20,600 square degrees of sky above your horizon at any moment. Inside it sit Betelgeuse, orange and off-centre, and the Milky Way's anticentre — you are looking directly away from the galaxy's core, out through the thin edge of the disc. That is why the winter sky is full of bright nearby stars and short of star clouds.
Seven hours of a winter night. The Hexagon comes up in the east lying on its side, stands upright crossing the south, and tips over into the west — and because its corners span 64° of sky, some part of it is above your horizon for most of the night. No other season puts this many first-magnitude stars in one view: of the 21 brightest stars in the whole sky, six are in this ring and a seventh is inside it.