It’s time to get out and enjoy the absolute beauty of the autumn night sky over Butler. We’re entering the prime time of stargazing season.

The nights are longer and with less humidity and the skies are generally more transparent. Dress warm and find out how awesome it is to lie back on a lawn chair and take in the show.

The dark skies of the countryside are best, but it’s even a great show if you have to put up with light pollution, unless it’s way out of hand.

Even though summer is long gone there are still many stars of summer hanging on in the western sky after twilight. You can still easily see the Summer Triangle high above the western horizon with the three bright stars from three separate constellations.

The brightest shiner is Vega in the constellation Lyra the Harp. In second place for brilliance is Altair in Aquila the Eagle.

The third brightest nuclear fusion furnace is Deneb in another bird constellation, Cygnus the Swan. Cygnus is also known by a lot of stargazers as the “Northern Cross,” because at first glance that’s what it really looks like.

Deneb is at the top of the cross and below you can see three dimmer stars that make up the crosspiece. Roll your eyes a little way below the crosspiece and look for an equally bright star at the foot of the cross. That’s Albireo.

You definitely want to check out Albireo with binoculars or a small telescope. You’ll like what you see here. Albireo is actually a double star. One star is gold and the other is blue and you can really see these colors.

The two stars look like they are right next to each other but they’re thought by many astronomers to be about one light-year apart.

Astronomers don’t know for sure but Albireo may be a binary system. The two stars could be orbiting each other in a period of around 100,000 years. I don’t think you want to stay to see that!

The Big Dipper is upright and riding low in the northwestern sky. In fact, it’s getting so low that it’s hard to see if you have a high tree line.

The Big Dipper is the most famous star pattern there is, but it’s technically not a constellation. The Big Dipper is actually the rear end and the tail of the constellation Ursa Major, the Big Bear. It’s also the brightest part of the Big Bear.

One of the pieces of star lore that I love involves the Big Bear and the nearby constellation Bootes, the hunting farmer.

By this time of the year Bootes is only partially visible above the northwest horizon, but this farmer Bootes has been hunting down the Big Bear all summer long.

He’s finally laid some pretty good shots into the beast and that’s why it’s falling so low in our sky.

The Big Bear is bleeding and as the blood falls on the trees and bushes it causes them to turn red. Forget about the leaves losing their chlorophyll. This is how we actually get our fall colors ... wink-wink, nod-nod.

Over in the eastern sky is the grand constellation Pegasus, the winged horse. Look for a giant diamond of stars on the rise in the east.

Just to the upper left of Pegasus is the Andromeda Galaxy, the next door neighbor to our Milky Way, nearly 2.5 million light years away, with just one light-year spanning nearly six trillion miles!

Unfortunately, the only planet available in the evening is Saturn but not for long. In the first part of October Saturn pops out in the later part of twilight very low in the southwestern sky and sets shortly after darkness sets in.

Because it’s so close to the horizon it’ll be super blurry in any sized telescope. By the end of the month it’ll already be below the horizon by sunset.

Celestial hugging

Later this week in the eastern sky about an hour before morning twilight the waning crescent moon will pass by the closely aligned planets Venus, Mars and Jupiter in the constellation Leo the Lion. It’ll be quite a sight worth waking up for!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist in Minneapolis/St. Paul and is author of the book, “Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations” published by Adventure Publications.