I have an assignment for you.

Since the moon will be out of the evening skies for the next week or so, I want you to take advantage of the dark skies and take a much closer look at the stars, closer than you've ever seen before.

Now you don't need a fancy telescope. In fact, for what I'm suggesting, a telescope is really inappropriate. I just want you take an average pair of binoculars and scan as much of the sky as you can.

If possible, get into the countryside where the skies are darker and just great, but if you have to settle for your backyard, that's OK too.

Lie back on a reclining lawn chair and cover up with enough blankets to stay warm. Your neighbors may think you're a little crazy but who knows, after a while they may turn off the TV and join you for a show that isn't littered with commercials. You are stargazing in the purist sense of the word!

As you lie on your back, scanning the skies with binoculars, you can't help but notice all the star clusters you run across.

Pleiades, presently in the high southwest sky in the early evening, is certainly the biggest cluster and you can easily see it with your naked eye. Pleiades, otherwise know as the "Seven Sisters," looks like a miniature Big Dipper.

In fact, I've even heard it referred to as the constellation Little Dipper. That's not the case, though, as the actual Little Dipper is quite a bit larger and it's in the northern sky.

The Pleiades through a pair binoculars is just precious! At more than 400 light-years away, this cluster has hundreds of stars jammed in an area less than 14 light-years in diameter. If you're new to this column, a light-year equals about 6 trillion miles!

Now keep surfing the night sky with your binoculars and I know you'll see more and more star clusters, certainly not as big and flashy as the Pleiades, but nonetheless beautiful.

Most of these star cluster are groups, or families, of young stars. In fact, the stars in the Pleiades are less than 100 million years old, and believe me, that's young when you're talking about stars.

What you're really seeing are stellar nurseries. Stars are born out of large clouds of hydrogen called nebulae, which are all around our Milky Way galaxy and millions of other galaxies.

One such nebula is just to the southeast of the Pleiades, just the three bright stars in a perfect row that form the belt of Orion the Hunter.

Even with the naked eye you can see this faint patch that looks like a fuzzy star. This is the famous Orion Nebulae, more than 1,400 light-years away and more than 26 light-years across.

With binoculars you can see a small group of stars within the wispy cloud of hydrogen. These very young stars are emitting huge amounts of ultraviolet radiation, which is lighting up the surrounding nebulae like a giant cosmic florescent light.

Stars continue their youth in these massive nuclear families, so to speak, but eventually as these clusters whirl around the galaxy several hundred times, gravity from other stars eventually pull these clusters apart.

As you scan the skies from your backyard, lying back on that lawn chair with the neighbors still watching you and thinking you're nuts, you can still see a lot of young stars are there, clusters and clusters of youngins'.