Week of May 14-20, 2023

Peer into a dark rural sky on a moonless night and you'll see more stars than you could ever imagine. All are suns, most with their own planetary systems, and are so distant that their light has taken decades or centuries to cross space before entering our eyes.

The stars we see account for only a tiny fraction of all that exist. They, along with hundreds of billions more, make up a colossal spiral structure we know as our Milky Way Galaxy — our home star city.

But this, too, is just a tiny part of our cosmos, for beyond our galaxy lie others — hundreds of billions of them, each with hundreds of billions of suns.

Now it's true that most of these island universes are much too distant and faint to see with our eyes, but not all. During the autumn months, we can spot the Great Andromeda Galaxy as a smudge of light within the constellation Andromeda, and from the Earth's Southern Hemisphere, one can easily see the Magellanic Clouds, two nearby galaxies entwined in a gravitational tango with our own Milky Way.

These are the only galaxies visible to the human eye. Aim a small telescope skyward, however, and all that changes, especially at this time of year.

In the eastern sky between the Big Dipper, Coma Berenices and Virgo lies one of the richest regions of galaxies visible to backyard telescopes. It's called the Realm of the Galaxies and it's definitely worth an entry into your bucket list of celestial sights.

Some spring night when the moon isn't up and you're far from city lights, scan a small telescope slowly through this region and you'll be stunned by the sight. Even an instrument of only four or six inches in diameter will reveal tiny fuzzy patches of light among the pinpoint stars: dozens of individual galaxies whose light left their sources ages ago when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

Toward the constellation of Virgo, for example, lies the famous Virgo Cluster of galaxies, a system of several thousand stellar systems bound together by gravitation and located some 60 or 70 million light years from our own Milky Way. Though we see only the brightest as tiny smudges of light, most are massive spiral and elliptical galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of suns and planetary systems.

Farther to the north, in the region of Coma Berenices, Berenice's Hair, we find the more distant Coma cluster. Lying some 400 million light years away, this cluster is home to a thousand galaxies that astronomers have discovered are embedded in a region of hot gas. We know today that, as the galaxies move through this material, they seem to become stripped of their gas and dust, the raw materials out of which new stars and planetary systems are born.

On the next clear, dark night, take a small telescope out for a spin through the cosmos. In just one short evening you'll be able to visit not only stars throughout our Milky Way but dozens of other galaxies across the nearby universe — a feat that would make even the great Captain James T. Kirk envious.

Some spring night when the moon isn't up and you're far from city lights, scan a small telescope slowly through this region and you'll be stunned by the sight.

Visit Dennis Mammana at dennismammana.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.