There's still a lot of great stargazing you can do, even you live in an urban/suburban setting, but unfortunately, the street lights, strip malls and more have cast a permanent luminance across our formerly dark night skies.
One of the celestial victims is the Milky Way, that magical ribbon of light that runs through the summer skies. It's vanished! Head out to the countryside though, and you can recapture its magnificence. It's well worth at least one trip in the late summer or early fall.
Once you're out there under the starry canopy, the great white river will be waiting for you. It arches across the high eastern sky, meeting the horizon in the northeast and southwest. By 10 p.m., the arch rises high enough to bisect the sky. You're witnessing the billions and billions of stars that make up the thickest part of the disk of stars we call our home galaxy, the Milky Way, made of up at least 200 billion stars and countless numbers of other planets. The diameter of the Milky Way spans an incredible 100,000 light years, with just one light year equivalent to nearly six trillion miles. There are so many stars in our line of sight in the Milky Way band that it appears as a milky ribbon in the sky. That's how the galaxy got its name, long before us Earthlings knew what we were really looking at.
Along the starry river of the Milky Way are some prominent constellations. On the northeast side is Cassiopeia the Queen, the one that looks like a sideways letter W. According to Greek mythology, the W depicts Cassiopeia, the queen of mythological Ethiopia. The very vain queen She got in trouble with Hera, the queen of the gods of Mount Olympus. Cassiopeia claimed she was so beautiful, in fact even more beautiful than Hera. This made Hera so angry that she swooped down from Olympus, tied Cassiopeia up in her thrown and pitched her up in the sky so she show the entire world how beautiful she is. Cassiopeia's being marooned up there ever since.
About halfway across the Milky Way, high in the eastern sky, look for three bright stars, the brightest ones in that area. They form what's known as the Summer Triangle. While it's not an official constellation, it's a great tool. The triangle will help you find three constellations, since those three stars are the brightest in their respective constellations; Lyra the Harp, Aquila the Eagle, and Cygnus the Swan.
Cygnus is nicknamed the Northern Cross since that's what it actually looks like. It's brightest star is Deneb, which doubles as the top of the cross and tail of the swan. Cygnus as the Northern Cross lies horizontally in the river of the Milky Way. Cygnus as a swan appears to be flying through the stream of stars.
On the southwest end of the Milky Way, near the horizon, is the zodiac constellation Sagittarius, the archer that looks a heck of a lot more like a teapot than a half-man, half-horse shooting an arrow at a scorpion. This is the most significant section of the Milky Way river since it's in the direction of the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. That part of the Milky Way band would be a whole lot brighter, except there's a lot of opaque interstellar gas and dust. If it weren't for that, it's believed that this part of the Milky Way would be as bright as a full moon. Astronomers know what's behind those clouds because they've looked in downtown Milky Way with infrared and X-ray telescopes that can "see" past the clouds to get a better idea of what's going on in the center of our home galaxy.
At the heart of the Milky Way lies a massive black hole that may be more than 14 million miles in diameter. Our own sun is less than a million miles in diameter. It's also believed to be around four million times the mass of our sun. It's thought by many astronomers that the gargantuan central black hole is the collective remains of gigantic stars that died a long time ago. There's a lot going on behind those clouds.
You probably don't have an X-ray or infrared telescope or space probe, but with just a small telescope or decent pair of binoculars, you can have a lot of fun. You'll also discover quite a few celestial treasures like bright nebulae clouds where stars are being born, dark rifts of hydrogen gas and clusters of young stars. You might even see a few human made satellites rolling across the heavens.
Lie back on the ground and roll your eyes all across the sky and especially around the Milky Way band. This coming week is actually a pretty good time to plan for such a venture because the moon doesn't rise until well after midnight.
I guarantee that this will be a treat that you'll remember for a long time, no matter if you're by yourself or with family or friends. Bring the blankets and bug juice, binoculars, star charts, snacks and beverages, and be prepared to sleep in the next morning. It will be a great show, but it will also be a late show. Even better, turn this into an overnight campout. Get to know our home galaxy.
Celestial hugging
The waning crescent moon will be hanging out with the planets Venus and Mars later this week in the pre-twilight eastern sky. On Thursday morning, the moon will be just to the lower left of Venus and a little to the right of Mars. With a small telescope of even a pair of binoculars, you'll see that Venus is crescent shaped just like the moon.
(Lynch is an amateur astronomer and is author of the book, "Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations." Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.)