With spring beginning astronomically on March 20 at 8:08 p.m., it's only appropriate that signs of spring are appearing in the sky.

It's not exactly a neon billboard, but the Beehive star cluster is a definite sign of spring in these late March evening skies. Another brighter sign of spring is Arcturus, the second brightest nighttime star, now showing up in the low eastern sky between 9:30 and 10 p.m.

But this column is about the Beehive cluster, located in the very faint constellation Cancer the Crab. Don't bother trying to find this constellation though. It's one of the faintest of the 66 constellations visible in Pennsylvania during the course of the year.

The Beehive cluster is actually brighter than most stars in the constellation. Instead, look in the high southeastern sky about halfway between the brighter constellations Leo the Lion and Gemini the Twins.

As you can see on the chart, the Beehive cluster is about 12 degrees, or one fist-width, to the upper right of the planet Saturn, which happens to be in that same celestial neighborhood in 2007. If it's dark enough where you are, the Beehive cluster, known astronomically as M-44, looks like a faint patchy cloud.

When ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus observed it around 130 BC, he registered it in his star catalog as a "cloudy star." The Romans saw it as a manger and called it Praesepe, Latin for manger.

Back then the Beehive's host constellation Cancer was known to some cultures, including the Greeks, as a pair of donkeys. The tale spun that the manger star cloud was where the beasts were feeding.

The donkeys and the manger were also a way to forecast the weather. It was said that a "murky manger" was a sign of rain. As much as I like natural weather forecasting in my daytime job, I won't be trading in computer models, satellite pictures or Doppler radar anytime soon for a pair of donkeys feeding at a manger.

It wasn't until the early 1600s, when Galileo poked his telescope toward Praesepe and saw it as a cluster of stars, that it eventually got the name Beehive cluster. With a decent pair of binoculars, you can easily see how it got that moniker.

Astronomically the Beehive is considered an open star cluster, a group of young stars that emerged out of the same nebula of hydrogen gas sprinkled with heavier elements from a long since exploded star.

The stars in this cluster are believed by astronomers to be about 400 million years old, and while that is considered a young age for a star, it is rather old for a cluster of young stars.

Many of these same kinds of clusters are gravitationally broken up before the stars are that old, but the Beehive is hanging in there. That "teenage mob" of at least 200 stars is over 3,400 trillion miles long and nearly 60 trillion miles wide.

By the way, if it's clear this coming Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, catch a nice conjunction between the new crescent moon and Venus. Venus is by far the brightest starlike object in the night sky right now. On Tuesday evening the very thin new crescent will be just to the lower right of Venus and on Wednesday evening the slight fatter crescent moon will be just above and slightly to the right of the planet.

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.