Stargazing is not for wimps!

In the winter months we have many hours to catch the celestial show performing nightly. You can grab an early supper and enjoy the stars without losing too much of your beauty sleep. But you have to fight cold night air and maybe frostbite.

Now that it’s finally warmed up and stargazing is comfortable again, you have to wait for it to be dark enough, and here in the northern part of the good ol’ U.S.A., evening twilight seems to go on forever. Sleep deprivation is just part of summer stargazing.

This week is really tough because we have a full moon washing out the almost summer sky. A lot of us keep the telescopes in the barn during full moons.

Don’t get me wrong, though. The full moon rising in the southeastern sky this time of year is a thing to behold. I’m lucky enough to have an aging hot tub in my backyard and one of my greatest pleasures is to lounge in the hot swirling water and watch the moon climb above the horizon.

I love to look for the face of the man on the moon. The dark maria or plains of the lunar surface make the big dark eyes and the rest of the face.

Another thing about full moons this time of year is that they don’t rise very high in the sky. They take the same low arc across the southern sky as the sun does as winter begins.

This makes sense because this time of year the sun takes a very high arc across the southern sky during the day, and because the full moon is on the opposite side of the sky from the sun, it just makes sense it would be a low rider in the southern heavens in the good ol’ summertime. What I like about that is you can take a nice stroll late on a summer night and still see the moon without craning your neck upward.

Full moons are a pain for stargazing because they really wash out dimmer stars and fainter celestial objects, and that’s especially true in the summer as the extra moisture of humidity in the air really spreads out the lunar light.

The full moon, however, can act as a nice natural pointer. As the moon makes one complete orbit around the Earth every 27 days, it migrates about 13 degrees to the east every 24 hours. As it does, it passes by and through the bright stars and constellations.

Early this week, the moon journeys through one of my favorite constellations — Scorpius the Scorpion. Scorpius is one of the rare constellations that actually resembles what it’s supposed to be. The only problem is that it’s hard to see the entire body of the scorpion because it never rises all that high around Butler.

You can see the head and torso of the Scorpion but the tail and stinger can be a problem. Scorpius is best seen in the southern part of the U.S. where it climbs higher in the southern sky.

On Monday night, you’ll see an almost full waxing gibbous moon in the low southeast sky at the start of evening twilight. Just to the left of the moon, look for a line of three moderately bright stars that may be washed out a bit in the moonlight. Those three stars make up the head of Scorpius the Scorpion.

At nightfall on Tuesday evening the moon will be virtually full. Just to the right of the moon you’ll easily see Antares, the brightest star in Scorpius that marks the heart of the great celestial beast. With even the naked eye you can see that Antares has a reddish tinge to it. With just a pair of binoculars you can definitely see its ruddy hue, so ruddy that Antares has an almost brick red appearance to it.

Some of that is due to Earth’s atmosphere. Just like the sun and moon, the thicker atmosphere near the horizon can make stars appear reddish, but Antares is actually what astronomers call a super red giant star and is in fact one of the biggest things you will ever see.

It looks so little and innocent as it twinkles next to our moon. That’s because it’s only 600 light-years away, with just one light-year equaling nearly six trillion miles.

Antares is one of the largest stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. It makes our sun look like a little stellar wimp. Antares has a diameter of nearly 700 million miles. Our Sun’s girth isn’t even one million miles, and when you consider that our Earth’s diameter isn’t even 8,000 miles, you get a real appreciation for how large Antares actually is.

Put it this way... if Antares replaced the sun in our solar system, its outer edge would almost reach out to Jupiter. Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars would be residing inside Antares. We wouldn’t have any more cold winters!

Antares is such a large star because it’s literally bloated. All stars have nuclear fusion furnaces in their cores, where hydrogen atoms are being smashed together to form heavier helium atoms.

Some of the hydrogen, however, is converted to massive amounts of light and other radiation. That’s how stars produce energy. When a star begins to run out of hydrogen atoms in its core, the core start collapsing due to gravity. In turn, that makes the helium core heat up so high that helium atoms fuse together to form heavier carbon and oxygen atoms and even more energy. That causes the star to expand hundreds of times in diameter and also to cool off, causing the star to sport a reddish hue, thus becoming a red giant.

This will happen to our own sun in about another five billion years, and when it does, it will get so big that it will swallow up Mercury and Venus and really cook up our Earth.

Antares is already a red giant, but because it was a much larger star to begin with, it’s now a super red giant star. Behemoth stars like Antares eventually become unstable and explode in super duper colossal supernovas.

For a few weeks Antares will outshine anything else in our galaxy. That could happen within the next million years. It could even happen tonight, although I wouldn’t wait up for it. Get your sleep.

Fortunately, Antares is far enough away so that when it does explode it won’t pose any danger to Earth... one less thing to worry about!

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.lynchandthestars.com.