Unfortunately, the evening constellations of spring are not known for their flashiness. It’s still worth staying up a little late for a night of stargazing, though. Three planets, Venus, Mars, and Saturn are stretched across the sky.

As evening twilight fades in our Butler skies, Venus is shining very brightly in the low western sky.

If you point even a small telescope or a good pair of binoculars at it, you’ll see that it’s shaped like a tiny crescent moon. Venus goes through phases like our moon, because its orbit around the sun is within Earth’s orbit around our home star.

Meanwhile, Mars begins the evening in the high south-southwestern sky with its distinctive reddish glow. Despite being the brightest starlike object in that part of the sky, Mars isn’t really much of telescope target. Because it’s only 4,000 miles in diameter you can’t see a whole lot of detail on it unless you have a larger scope, and even with that all you can see most nights on Mars are a few fuzzy dark spots, which are part of its extensive valley and canyon network.

Saturn is up in the southeastern evening sky and also easy to see. Just look for two stars right next to each other, one on the lower right and the other on the upper left. Saturn is the one on the upper left. For the record, the star on the lower right is Spica, the brightest star in the large but faint constellation Virgo.

Saturn is by far the best planet to view through even a small telescope. Unless there’s something wrong with your scope you should easily be able to see Saturn’s 130,000-plus-mile diameter ring system and maybe some of its moons that resemble tiny little stars swarming the ringed wonder.

Even with the three bright planets lighting up the evening sky this year we’re definitely in the star watching doldrums between the big show in the winter sky and the delights of the summer sky.

Coma Berenices is one of the exceptions, though. It’s small and dim when you try to see it in light polluted skies, but get out in the countryside just a little and you’ll like what you see. It has a great story.

Coma Berenices is one of the newer constellations, listed in 1602 as a constellation to honor Tycho Brahe, the famous and somewhat infamous astronomer who had died just one year earlier.

Tycho was the son of wealthy Danish nobility and became fascinated with astronomy when he witnessed a partial solar eclipse when he was 14.

He used mom and dad’s money to set up a great astronomical observatory so he could make and perfect even more observations. When his money ran out, he moved to Prague at the invitation of the monarchy.

He recorded years and years of observations, without a telescope, that went on to help many future astronomers.

Tycho was not your run of the mill ivory tower type. He ate, drank, and partied. He was arrogant and combative. At age 20 he got into a sword fight and got his nose cut off. He replaced his birth nose with an artificial one made of solid gold. Tycho and his gold nose met his demise at the age of 55, when he died of a bladder infection after boozing it up at yet another party. He worked hard and played hard, a little too hard.

Anyway, the main part of his constellation Coma Berenices looks like faint strands of hair flowing high in the south-southeastern sky just below the overhead zenith in the early evening. It’s not far from the Big Dipper’s handle.

The “hair” is known by astronomers as the Melotte Star Cluster 111. It’s actually one of the closest star clusters to the Earth, about 250 light years away. That’s still 1,600-trillion miles away.

Coma Berenices is a very extended family of hundreds of stars that formed from the same gaseous nebulae about 400 to 600 million years ago (relatively young stars).

According to mythology, Coma Berenices is named after Queen Berenices, the wife of the famous Egyptian Pharaoh, Ptolemy III. The story goes that the great Pharaoh was leading his troops into a fierce war. Every night Queen Berenices prayed to the gods for his safe return and was so desperate to see him again she promised to cut off all her beautiful hair if her husband returned safe and sound.

About a year later Ptolemy returned victorious and true to her word, the queen cut off her hair and dedicated it to Aphrodite, goddess of love.

Just days later some scoundrels seeking souvenirs hoisted Berenices’ hair out of the temple. When the hair heist was discovered, Ptolemy and Bernices were ready to roll some heads, literally. All of the temple priests were within hours of execution when a traveling group of Greek consulting astronomers literally saved their necks.

They convinced Ptolemy and Bernices to go out with them that night to see a brand new pale cluster of light high in the sky. “Look!” they exclaimed, “do you not see the clustered curls of the queen’s hair?” They continued, “Aphrodite and the other gods believed that the queen’s hair was just too beautiful for a single temple to possess. Berenices’ hair belongs in the heavens for all to see!”

Much to the relief of the temple priests, Berenices and Ptolemy swallowed this line of bull. Consultants can be very convincing, even today!