A traditional Easter Egg hunt is a lot of fun, especially for kids. I certainly enjoyed them when I was young, a few dozen years ago.

It’s also a lot of fun to roll across starry night skies with a pair of binoculars. Telescopes can certainly let you see heavenly bodies with more magnification, but a pair of binoculars lets you see wider areas of the sky in a single view.

You don’t have to have a super-duper large pair of binoculars for stargazing. In fact, it’s much better to have a smaller pair that you can hold up while you’re sitting back in a reclining lawn chair, so you can navigate the sky without getting tennis elbow.

You could put some larger binoculars on a tripod, but you would certainly lose the quick mobility of moving the scopes around the heavens with your bare hands. I advise newcomers to stargazing to get to know their way around the stars and constellations with both their bare eyes and binoculars before sliding that credit card through to buy that telescope. It will make your time with a telescope a lot more fun if you do your “homework” ahead of time.

One of the best celestial treats you will run into when you scan your binoculars across the Butler night sky are star clusters, made up of mainly young stars, generally less than 100 million years old, which is considered grossly underage compared to the rest of the more mature stars like our sun, which is celebrating around five billion years of stellar life.

Before you start your binocular browsing in the night sky, make sure that you’re comfortable. Sit or lie back on a reclining lawn chair or hammock. It’s so much more comfortable than standing, holding your binoculars over your head, especially when you’re gazing straight overhead. I guarantee that will get really old in a hurry!

You can start your binocular browsing from any point in the heavens, making sure to pan slowly across the sky so you don’t miss anything. I’d like to propose a good starting point right now, the Pleiades star cluster, also known as the “Seven Little Sisters.”

You can easily see the Pleiades at nightfall with just your naked eyes in the low western sky. It really resembles a tiny little dipper but it’s nowhere near the actual Little Dipper constellation. It’s a classic open cluster of young stars not much more than 100 million years old, lying a little more than 400 light years away with just one light-year clocking in at nearly six trillion miles.

The Pleiades are fabulous through binoculars. In fact, I think they’re better looking through binoculars than a telescope. Also make sure you take long, continual stares through your binoculars at the Pleiades or any other cluster. The longer you look the more you’ll see as your eyes get adjusted to the light level in your binoculars.

Not too far away from the Pleiades in the low northwestern sky, you can find another great celestial Easter Egg, or actually a pair of eggs.

It’s the Double Cluster of Perseus and I know you’ll love, love, love it! Just look for the very easy to see constellation Cassiopeia the Queen. It’s as bright as the Big Dipper and resembles a sideways W. Just look to the right of the W and you can’t miss it. There are many, many stars in that area because the Double Cluster lies in the plane and one of thickest parts of our home Milky Way galaxy.

The two side by side, nearly identical clusters are really far away at around 7.000 light years distant. The light we see from the twin spin of clusters this spring originally left those stars back around 5,000 B.C.

More challenging celestial Easter Eggs are found within the bright winter constellation Auriga, that resembles a lopsided pentagon about halfway from the western horizon to the overhead zenith in the evening sky.

Pan your binoculars in and look closely around the lopsided pentagon. These are astronomically referred to as M36, M37, and M38. All three of these huddled clusters of young stars are a little more than 4,000 light years away.

M37 and M38 are the largest and oldest of the trio of clusters, both between 20 to 25 light years across and occupied by hundreds of stars.

M37 and M38 are also relatively older groups of stars, ranging from 200 to 300 million years old. This would make them “teenagers” in star years. M36 is smaller and younger, by comparison it’s in stellar day care.

It may take you a little time to find this trio of star clusters. That’s just another reason to take advantage of a reclining lawn chair!

Celestial hugging

Monday through Wednesday mornings the waning moon passes by the bright planets Saturn and Mars in the southern morning sky. It should be quite a sight.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul and is author of the book, “Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and at www.adventurepublications.net.