The bright band of milky light that bisects the sky from north to south like a bold artist's stroke is the Milky Way galaxy. Every single star you see, including the sun, are all members of our home galaxy.

Summer stargazing has many enemies, or should I say challenges, including city lights, moonlight and mosquitoes.

You can fight city lights by driving out to the countryside and you can put on life-saving bug juice to fight off the skeeters, but when it comes to moonlight, timing is everything. The less moon the better, and over the next week or so there will be very little moonlight. Galaxy gazing will be wonderful!

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'll be a great show, but it'll also be a late show. Even better, turn this into an overnight camp-out.

So there you are, gazing into the summer heavens. How many stars can you see with your naked eye? Conventional astronomy textbooks say that you can see about 3,000 stars with the naked eye but I'm sure there's a lot more than that.

Warning, do not try to count them! You'll fall asleep for sure and your show will be over.

You can't help but notice the bright band of milky light that bisects the sky from north to south like a bold artist's stroke. You may have been taught at an early age that the band is the Milky Way galaxy. While that's certainly true, what you have to realize is that every single star you see anytime, including the sun, are all members of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. That artist's band across the sky is just the thickest part.

If you could jump into a magical spaceship and fling yourself out and away from the Milky Way, what you would see in your rearview mirror is a group of around a trillion stars in the shape of a giant CD, broken up into spiral arms with a large hump in the middle.

The Milky Way is a little more than 100,000 light-years in diameter and 10,000 light-years thick, with one light year equal to about 6 trillion miles. Our sun is about 60,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy in one of the arms.

When you see that milky band of light across the sky from your blanket or lawn chair, you are looking edgewise into our galaxy. All the stars we see obediently orbit around the center of the Milky Way. Our sun takes over 200 million years to make one circuit. In case you're wondering, the center of the Milky Way lays in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius the Archer, more commonly known by its nickname, "the Teapot," because that's what it really looks like.

The Milky Way band is not really all that much brighter around the teapot, because there is a lot of dark interstellar gas and dust that blocks the "hump" at our galaxy's center. It's been said that if we could see the Milky Way's central region unobstructed, that area of the sky would be much brighter than a full moon!

Lie back on the ground and just roll your eyes all across the sky and especially around the Milky Way band. With just a pair of binoculars you'll see all kinds of celestial treasures.

Oh, one more thing to keep in mind while you're galaxy gazing. Our Milky Way galaxy is only one of millions of other galaxies out there. The Hubble telescope has seen galaxies more than 15 billion light-years away! It's a big sky out there for you to enjoy. Don't miss it!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and author of the book, "Pennsylvania Starwatch," available at bookstores and at his Web site www.lynchandthestars.com.