A nasty celestial bird is soaring in the early evening Butler southwestern sky.

Aquila, the Eagle, is one of the 65-plus constellations available in our night skies during the year.

According to Greek mythology, Aquila was a favorite pet and an enforcer for Zeus, the king of the gods of Mount Olympus.

Like most of the members of the hierarchy of Greek gods, he wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy with his supreme power. He was ruthless and then some!

The brightest part of the constellation Aquila resembles a large, diagonally orientated diamond that outlines Aquila's wingspan, with his tail trailing off to the lower right.

Unfortunately, no bright stars outline the eagle’s head; you really need to use your full imagination to see that.

The brightest star in Aquila the Eagle is Altair, one of the four stars in the diamond depicting the wingspan and marking the heart of the Eagle.

Altair is easy to find because it’s one of three bright “Summer Triangle” stars in the high southern sky.

It isn’t an official constellation, but its three stars — Altair, Vega and Deneb — are the brightest in that part of the sky, and each is the brightest star in its own constellation.

Altair is the moderately bright star at the bottom of the triangle if you’re facing south.

Altair is the 12th brightest star in our night sky and is fairly close by, at least astronomically. It's only about 17 light-years away, or about 97 trillion miles. Believe it or not, that’s much closer than most stars in our heavens. Because of its proximity, astronomers know quite a bit about it.

Altair is almost 1.5 million miles in diameter, twice as large as our sun, and gushes out much more light than our home star, more than 10 times as much.

The most fascinating discovery about Altair is that it's quite the spinner and has the bulging waistline to prove it.

At the Palomar observatory in California, astronomers discovered that Altair’s diameter is more than 20 percent larger along its equator than from pole to pole.

Altair is spinning on its axis at the dizzying rate of one full rotation in less than 10 hours! By comparison, our sun takes more or less an entire month to make one rotation.

Altair is basically a big ball of gas like all other stars, so the rapid spinning and centrifugal force — the same force you feel on a fast merry-go-round — causes it to bulge out big-time at its equator.

If you have a small to a moderately-sized telescope, there's a nice cluster of young stars you can spy just off the tail to the right of Aquila.

It's formally known as Messier Object 11, or M11 for short. Technically, it's located in a small adjacent constellation called Scutum the Shield. M11 is a beautiful open cluster of well over 3,000 young stars more than 6,000 light-years, or 35 thousand trillion miles, away!

These young stars are only around 300 million years old, considered infancy for stellar age. M11 has the “Wild Duck Cluster” nickname because many people see it as a flock of flying ducks. See if you can!

Now, back to Aquila’s Greek mythological story. Before Aquila the Eagle became the favorite pet, Zeus commanded Aquila to seek out a "servant" for the gods of Mount Olympus. Zeus wanted someone who would do all the housekeeping, wash the windows, mow the lawn, tend the gardens, and be a highly-skilled bartender to the gods.

Aquila soared through the skies for weeks in search of just the right man. He finally spotted a shepherd named Ganymede tending a huge flock of sheep. Aquila studied him for hours and hours and observed how hard-working this dedicated young shepherd was.

Ganymede was definitely the right choice, and Aquila promptly plucked him away from the sheep and whisked him up to Mount Olympus. It was tough on Ganymede at first. He greatly missed his family and his sheep, but over time his tears dried, and the job grew on him.

He became buddies with many of the gods, and being a handsome young man, he attracted the attention of many a beautiful goddess!

Zeus was so pleased with Aquila for his diligence in finding Ganymede that he adopted the faithful Eagle as a pet. He began to trust Aquila with more noble duties, such as occasionally delivering Zeus’s thunderbolts to Earth.

After a few short years, Aquila became Zeus’s chief of staff and personal messenger, as well as his diabolical “hit bird.” Anytime Zeus felt it necessary to enforce or punish, he called on Aquila with his razor-sharp beak to carve up the violator. You don't mess with Zeus!!! The evil Eagle would punish mortals and gods alike with great dispatch and without mercy.

After a long life of terrorizing, Aquila finally met his fate while on yet another bloody mission. He accidentally soared into a mountainside on a foggy morning (GPS systems weren't quite as accurate back in those days).

An incredibly distraught Zeus memorialized his faithful hit bird by placing his body among the stars, soaring in the heavens, and reminding all not to mess with the king of the gods!

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