The planet Mars has been our celestial guest in the Butler night sky all this past winter, and now that we're into spring, it's starting out the evening nearly straight overhead.

As soon as it's dark enough, which is now later because of daylight-saving time, crank your cranium to the zenith and look for the brightest starlike object you can see. You might want to give your neck and back a break (in a good way) and bring out the reclining lawn chairs and relax under our Martian neighbor.

Even with the naked eye, Mars sports a copperish red hue. Mars is very bright in our early spring skies, but it'll continue to wane in brightness as Earth and Mars drift farther apart from each other as both planets continue their independent circuits around the sun.

If you don't have high expectations, Mars can be moderately interesting through a telescope, but certainly not as intriguing as Jupiter and Saturn. But through even smaller telescopes, you can resolve the disk of the small planet and might see some fuzzy dark markings that are Mars' extensive valley and canyon system.

Not only is Mars hanging overhead to kick off spring, but it also is hanging close by what many call the star cluster of spring. By most stargazers, it's called the Beehive Cluster because through a small telescope, binoculars or with the naked eye if the sky is dark enough, the cluster of spring resembles a hoard of bees buzzing around and protecting their heavy hive.

For the next several weeks, you can use Mars to find the beehive. If you roughly face the southeast, the Beehive Cluster will be hanging about five degrees below Mars. That's about half the width of your clenched fist held out at arm's length. Just make sure anyone around you doesn't get the wrong idea when you do this.

The Beehive Cluster is 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 during the year. The Beehive Cluster is actually brighter than most of the stars in the constellation.

One of the first to officially document the Beehive cluster was Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who observed it about 130 B.C. He registered it in his star catalog as a "cloudy star." The Romans saw it as a manger and called it Praesepe, which is Latin for manger.

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

The donkeys and the manger also were a way to forecast the weather. It was said that "a murky manger" was a sign of rain.

Meteorologically, this makes some sense, because as weather systems move in, high level moisture is often the first thing that is observed, and that added humidity, which will murk up fainter stars like the Beehive.

As a meteorologist, I can tell you the more weather forecasting tools you have the better!

It wasn't until the early 1600s when Galileo poked his telescope toward the Praesepe and saw it as a cluster of stars that it eventually got the name Beehive Cluster.

With your not-so-crude telescope — or even 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 500 million to 600 million years old, and while that's 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 time the stars are that old, but the Beehive is hanging in there.

The mostly "teenage mob" of at least 1,000 stars is more than 3,400 trillion miles from Earth and at least 225 trillion miles wide.

The planet Saturn is on the rise this spring and is just about at its minimum distance to Earth for 2010. We're coming into a wonderful time for viewing Saturn with just about any size telescope, and that'll be my focus in the coming week.

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.