Love is in the air this week, and in the night sky too! Valentine's Day is upon us this week and no doubt you'll be reminded of that again and again by anyone hawking greeting cards, candy, flowers or jewelry.

There's even a celestial sign of Valentine's Day in the evening sky and you can easily show your beloved after that romantic dinner you have planned. You do have one planned don't you? The heavens are offering a lovely bright red triangle in the high southeast sky for your viewing pleasure, made up of the red planet Mars and two distinctly reddish stars.

Mars is the brightest of the celestial love triangle and is the brightest starlike object in that part of the sky in the evening. It definitely has a reddish hue to it, but that has nothing to do with love. Mars's ruddiness is mainly due to iron oxide in its soil. In other words, you're showing the one you love a lot of rust. Now isn't that romantic!

Mars literally dodged a bullet last month as a 150-foot-wide asteroid just missed slamming into it by less than 20,000 miles. That would have left a mark. The sad news about Mars is that it's continuing to gradually fade in our night sky as the 4000-mile-wide planet and Earth retreat from each other in their respective orbits around the sun. Don't you let your love for each other fade!

The next member of our celestial red triangle is the reddish star Aldebaran. Just look for the next brightest star you see to the right of Mars. Hold your clenched fist at arm's length and Aldebaran will be just under two fist-widths to the right of Mars.

Aldebaran is the brightest star in the small but distinct constellation Taurus the Bull, which allegedly outlines the face of the mighty celestial beast with Aldebaran marking the bull's angry red eye. Taurus also looks like an arrow flying through the heavens. Could Cupid be shooting off his love in the heavens?

The third member of the ruby celestial triangle is the bright red star Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars in the wonderful constellation Orion the Hunter. You can snuggle up with the one you love and remind him or her that Betelgeuse marks the armpit of the mighty hunter. That may or may not spur on love magic for you, but Betelgeuse definitely has connections to Valentine's Day.

It's a super giant red star that expands and contracts like a huge beating heart, from about 500 million miles in diameter at its smallest, dwarfing our sun's 864,000 mile girth, to almost a billion miles wide at its largest. Betelgeuse is probably the biggest single thing you've ever seen, even at 2900 trillion miles away!

Eventually this huge beating heart star will break and it will definitely get our attention on Earth. Betelgeuse is a star nearing the end of its life and is guaranteed to go out with quite a bang. All stars produce energy by fusing hydrogen into helium in their core. Large massive stars like Betelgeuse quickly go through hydrogen fuel and have much shorter life times.

Many astronomers believe that Betelgeuse is probably no more than 10 million years old. Our own smaller sun has been around for at least 5 billion years and is expected to shine on for at least another 5 billion years into the future. When Betelgeuse completely exhausts its fuel in the next couple hundred thousand years, it will become highly unstable and blow itself up in a gargantuan supernova explosion. For a few weeks it will temporarily become brighter than an entire galaxy of stars!

I hope as you love birds out there gaze up at the romantic celestial love triangle this week that your love will explode for each other in a good way!

Later on this month there will be more red in the sky as we'll have a total lunar eclipse on Feb. 20. I'll have more on that in next week's Starwatch column.

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