Scorpius and Sagittarius are my favorite constellations of summer, nestled nicely side by side in the low southern skies after evening twilight. They're best seen if you have a fairly clear and flat horizon toward the south. A high tree line in that direction will at least partially block your view and you'll miss a really lively part of the heavens.

Scorpius is one of those few constellations that actually looks like what it's supposed to be. On the right side of the sideways celestial Scorpion you can easily see a sideways “T” that makes up the head of the Scorpion. A little to the left of the head is the bright reddish star Antares that is by far the brightest star in the constellation.

Antares also marks the heart of the scorpion. On the left side there's a distinctly curved line of stars that makes the stinger. That can be hard to see, though, because parts of it are very close to the horizon where the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere kicks in.

To the left of Scorpius is Sagittarius the Archer, an archer shooting an arrow with the body of a human from the waist up, but the body of a horse from the waist down, according to Greek mythology. With a generous imagination you can kind of-sort of see a figure shooting an arrow. What the constellation really looks like is a teapot as you see on the diagram.

If you're viewing Scorpius and Sagittarius from a neighborhood with the nasty effects of light pollution you won't see a whole lot more than just basic outlines of the constellations, but if you're stargazing in the country and blessed with much darker skies on nights without moonlight (like we'll have this coming week), you'll see a whole lot more and you can't help but be awed! In fact, you'll go galactic!

You'll see a milky band of light that bisects the dome of the sky, stretching from the low southern skies around Scorpius and Sagittarius to nearly overhead and back down the northeast horizon. That band of light is known as the Milky Way band.

All the stars we see in our Butler sky, anytime of night or anytime of year, are all members of our home Milky Way galaxy. Along with our sun there may be more than 400 billion other stars. If you could somehow magically zip out of our home galaxy and look back at it through the rearview mirror, the Milky Way would look like a huge disk of stars split into several spiral arms with a spherical central bulge.

The diameter of the disk of spiral arms is about 100,000 light years. If you're new to this column, just one light-year equals nearly six trillion miles.

The width of the disk is very thin by comparison, believed to be only about a thousand light years thick. The central bulge is a lot thicker with a diameter of more than 10,000 light years. Our sun lies in one of the spiral arms of the disk, about 30,000 light years from the center of the central bulge.When you observe the Milky Way band in our sky you are looking edgewise into the disk of spirals that make up the plane of our galaxy. There are so many billions of stars so far away that their combined light generates that ghostly milky glow we see. All of the other stars we see on either side of the band are much closer to our sun and Earth, more or less in our local neighborhood.The central bulge of the Milky Way galaxy is in the direction of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius. If it weren't for intervening dark clouds of hydrogen gas, that part of the sky would probably always be as bright as the full moon and would occupy much of that part of the sky.Nonetheless it's a great part of the sky to peruse with your telescope or even a pair of binoculars because there are many tight star clusters and lit up nebulas of hydrogen gas. I guarantee that if you take your time looking around you'll have a good time.The biggest nebula is the Lagoon Nebula that you may be able to see with the naked eye. It actually looks like a puff of steam coming out of the Sagittarius teapot.The nebula is about 5,000 light years away with dimensions of roughly 50 by 100 light years. It's called the Lagoon Nebula because through binoculars and telescopes it has a bit of greenish glow to it. The reason the gas glows is because of new stars that have formed within it that kick out so much ultraviolent energy that the individual atoms of hydrogen are being jumbled around which causes light to be emitted. The light we see from the nebula is the combined light from trillions and trillions of hyperactive hydrogen atoms.Enjoy our home galaxy.<B>Celestial hugging </B>Early morning on Aug. 31, the bright planet Jupiter will be shining just to the left of the crescent moon in the predawn eastern sky. With a small telescope or even a pair of binoculars you may see up to four moons to the upper right of Jupiter's disk.