Week of July 13-19, 2014

Nothing in the heavens says "summertime" to Northern Hemisphere sky watchers quite like the constellation of Sagittarius. And on July evenings, we can find this bright star grouping low in our south-southeastern sky after dark.

Sagittarius, the archer, is often imagined as a centaur, a half-man and half-horse, most likely because ancient Greek and Roman authors often confused Sagittarius with Centaurus, a constellation farther to the southwest. Interestingly, however, its origin may have come much earlier than this; the stellar figure seems to personify the archer Nergal, a god of war, inscribed on ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets. It's even included as a "Horse's Head" or "Horseman" in the 3,000-year-old zodiac of India, while the human part of the figure is depicted by a fan of lion's tails owned by the wife of an Indian ruler.

Of course, you can search for a horseman or archer among the stars if you'd like, but if you'd prefer to save your sanity, forget about such a figure and look instead for the outline of an old-fashioned teapot. Here you'll find eight stars that easily trace its body, handle, lid and spout. And just above the teapot we can even find among the stars the outline of a sugar spoon and, below, a slice of lemon formed by the southern constellation Corona Australis, the Southern Crown.

Stargazers with a moonless sky far from the spillage of city lights will see a hazy cloud of "vapor" streaming upward from the teapot's spout. This is the Milky Way that seems to rise out of the southern horizon and stretch completely across the sky to the north.

The section of the Milky Way just above the teapot's spout marks the direction of our galaxy's center. Though no one can see its core directly because of all the gobs of interstellar material filling the 26,000 or so light years that separate us from it, astronomers suspect that it's in this galactic core that a super-massive black hole might lurk.

The first thing you'll notice about the Milky Way is that it's not uniform in brightness. It is, instead, mottled with dark rifts along its entire length. These are known to astronomers as giant molecular clouds, or GMCs, massive clouds of interstellar dust that stand in stark silhouette against the Milky Way's brighter stellar band. It is within these GMCs that massive star- and planet-forming regions exist, hidden from eyes not privileged enough to be peering with infrared telescopes.

Scan binoculars along the Milky Way on a clear, dark night and you'll be impressed with how much you can see. Not only will they reveal countless stars invisible to the eye, but dozens of deep sky objects, or "faint fuzzies" as astronomers like to call them; these include star clusters and gaseous nebulae. All will appear as small, hazy smudges of light but, if you've got a small telescope, aim it in their directions for an even closer and more impressive look.

I think you'll find that exploring this region of the heavens from a dark sky site to be a relaxing and wonderfully stellar way to spend the warm nights of summer.

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