It's hard to say what the best constellation of summer is because there are so many choices, but one of my favorites is Scorpius the Scorpion. It really looks like a scorpion — not that we have a lot of terrestrial scorpions crawling around Western Pennsylvania to compare it to.

Right now, Scorpius is at its highest height in our southern skies as evening begins. But it's not all that high. The scorpion is a low rider with its stinger barely above the horizon. You certainly won't crane your neck to see it. And in fact, unless you have a really low, flat, treeless southern horizon, you have no chance of seeing Scorpius' stinger.

I think it's certainly worth going some place with a low, flat horizon to see the business end of the celestial scorpion. Although, even if you do, it's still a bit of a challenge, because even in clear skies, visibility is naturally hampered for stargazing that close to the horizon. You have to look through a lot more of Earth's blurring atmosphere. Moderate to heavy light pollution and a lot of humidity in the air add to the visual challenge. If you're ever in the southern United States, Scorpius will be a lot higher above the horizon, and you can get a much better look at it.

None-theless, Scorpius is still very much worth your stargazing perusal. This coming week, the growing ovalish gibbous moon on its way to being full next weekend will help you find the scorpion. Our lunar neighbor will migrate eastward above the constellation night to night.

Scorpius' brightest star Antares is positioned at the heart. Appropriately, it has a dark red ruddy hue to it, not because it's pumping blood to the beast's extremities but because it's what astronomers call a super red giant star, and it's truly a behemoth! The Earth is about 8,000 miles in diameter, which is a dwarf compared to our sun's nearly 1 million mile diameter. However, our sun is a pipsqueak compared to Antares, which has a diameter spanning nearly 700 million miles! If you kicked the sun out of the center of our solar system and replaced it with Antares, the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars would be living inside Antares! While it's one of the brightest stars in our night sky it, could be a lot brighter if it wasn't so far away. Mapquest Antares, and you'll find you need to journey almost 3,500 trillion miles to get there.

Speaking of Mars, the name Antares is derived from Greek and roughly translates to "rival of Mars." Because of its ruddy hue, it can be easily confused with Mars, which, by the way, is putting on quite a show with three other planets in the low western sky. (I'll have more on that at the end of this report.)

Antares clearly demonstrates stars aren't just little white lights. Many stars have a slight or distinctive hue to them that can tell you much about their nature. Quite simply, just as it is with colors you see in summer campfires, reddish flames are relatively cooler than blueish flames.Our sun is considered a yellowish white star with the temperature at its outer layer, called the photosphere, at a little more than 10,000 degrees. You won't need a jacket hanging out by Antares, but it is cooler at just under 6,000 degrees.Antares is in the process of slow death as it is running out of nuclear fuel in its core. In the next billion years — or maybe even a little sooner — Antares will become so unstable it will blow itself to bits in a tremendous supernova explosion. What's left of it will be spewed out in all directions, becoming the building blocks of future stars and planets.Another interesting star in Scorpius is Graffias, which makes up the head of the scorpion to the upper right of Antares. It's actually not one star but a double star, and even with a good pair of binoculars, you can spot them. One of the stars even has a lovely bluish green hue to it indicating it's a much hotter star than Antares.For extra credit, take a small- to moderate-sized telescope and pan it just to the right of Antares, and you'll see what looks like a fuzzy star. That's actually what astronomers call a globular cluster, a spherical collection of thousands of stars crammed into a ball about 200 trillion miles in girth. This giant nuclear family of stars is more than 6,000 light-years away with just one light-year weighing in at almost 6 trillion miles! Through a moderate to larger telescope, you might be able to see some of the individual stars at the outside edge of the cluster.Next week, I want to tell you about the rich lore of Scorpius the Scorpion, but before I go, I have to bring you up to speed on the great planet traffic jam developing in the low western sky toward the end of evening twilight. Four planets are visible in proximity to each other. Physically, they're nowhere near each other, but right now, they happen to be seen in the same general direction from Earth.The easiest one to see is Venus, the brightest starlike object you can see in the entire evening sky right now. Just to the upper left of Venus, the next brightest objects you'll see are Mars and Saturn.For extra credit, see if you can spot Mercury to the lower right of Venus. It will be very challenging because it's so close to the horizon and it'll only be visible for a short time in the early evening twilight — about 9:30 p.m. — before it slips below the horizon. With a telescope, there is not a lot of detail to be seen because of Earth's blurring atmosphere, but you might see a little bit of Saturn's rings.During the next couple weeks, these planets will draw even closer to each other, and I'll have more on that in next week's edition. Stay tuned!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.