When you first gaze upon the stars in our Butler heavens, even in the dark countryside, they just look like little white lights of varying brightness.

As they say, the devil’s in the details, but in this case, it’s not devilish but beautiful.

With a small telescope or even a pair of binoculars that allow you to gather in more light, you’ll see that many stars actually sport subtle colors to them. Sometimes you even see color in brighter stars with just your eyes.

Some colors are easy to see, like the red on Mars because of all the rust on its surface, but in most cases you just have to “dig” a little.

But by digging, you can make some really nice discoveries! Let me give you some examples across the early evening April sky.

I’ll use a constellation that’s easy to find, the majestic Orion the Hunter now residing in the western sky.

The easiest star color to see there is on Betelgeuse, an Arabic name which translates to “armpit of the great one.” Yep, that’s what Betelgeuse marks, the armpit of the great hermit hunter.

Betelgeuse has a very distinctive orange-red glow to it. Betelgeuse is also one of the biggest single things you’ve ever seen with a diameter more than 500 million miles! Our sun isn’t even a million miles across.

Now, by color contrast, take a look at Bellatrix, the bright star across from Betelgeuse that marks the left shoulder of Orion.

You won’t really see much color with the naked eye, but if you point your telescope or binoculars at it, you should see that it has a very deep shade of blue. It’s almost purple.

There’s really no other bright star in the sky that matches it. As I said though, you have to dig a little to see it.

The color of a star, no matter how subtle it is, can tell us quite a bit about its nature, especially its temperature.

It’s really very simple, the bluer the star the hotter it is, and the redder it is the cooler it is. It’s like staring into a campfire: The hottest flames are the blue ones with temperatures that can exceed 2,000 degrees and the coolest are the red ones around 1,000 degrees. In between are the yellowish ones.

That’s where the similarity ends because even the cooler stars like Betelgeuse are hotter than any blues flames in any campfire.

Astro-nomers have estimated by multiple methods the surface temperature of Orion’s armpit is just less than 6,000 degrees and the surface temperature on Bellatrix is 39,000 degrees. Careful roasting your marshmallows there!

Most of the other bright stars of Orion, like the three stars in a row that make up his belt and Rigel at the knee cap of the mighty hunter, all have a slight blue tinge to them but not nearly as blue as Bellatrix. Therefore, they are not as hot as Bellatrix.

The color of a star can also tell you at least indirectly about other traits of a star.

Most reddish stars like Betelgeuse are classified as red giants — bloated stars reaching the end of their lives as they’re running out of hydrogen fuel.

Depending on how massive the stars are, they eventually shed much of their material away and shrink down to what’s called a white dwarf star, not much bigger than our Earth.

This is the fate of our sun in roughly another six billion years.

For stars much more massive than our sun, they’ll go out with a tremendous bang!

They become very unstable and burst out in supernova explosions. What’s left of those exploded stars shrinks down to very dense neutron stars or possibly infamous black holes.

Most bluish stars are massive ones to begin with and are not long for this universe as they gobble up their hydrogen fuel in their cores at incredible rates.

Now, they’ll probably be around next Tuesday but compared to low mass stars like our sun, they’re short-lived, lasting in some extreme cases less than a billion years.

Our own sun has an expected lifetime of 11 to 12 billion years. The moral of the story is that if you’re a star and want to live a long time, don’t be a fat star.

Speaking of our sun, it has a surface temperature of about 10,000 degrees and is considered by astronomers to be yellow-white.

To the left of Orion in the western sky is the bright star Capella, the brightest star in the constellation Auriga the Chariot Driver turned goat farmer.

It’s also a yellow-white star, but that’s where the similarity ends. Capella is actually a pair of stars revolving around each other about 42 light years from Earth. Both stars are way larger than our sun, but they’re similar to our sun in temperature at about 10,000 degrees.

I have to admit it takes a big visual effort to see yellow pigment in Capella.

Scan your telescope or binoculars around the rest of the sky and you’ll see our celestial dome is anything but black and white, and let the color of stars tell you a little about them.

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 website www.lynchand thestars.com.