'Tis the season for summer parades with the Fourth of July drawing near and in the evening sky planets are definitely on parade.

Venus, Mars and Saturn are still putting on a nice show in the Butler western sky and are assembled in nearly a straight line as they march toward the horizon.

All three of our fellow solar system mates will not only continue their parade nightly through July but they'll also be performing some pretty fancy maneuvers.

Planets are always on the move against the background of the far more distant stars. When they happen to be close together in the sky like Venus, Mars and Saturn are right now they can really put on a show.

Planets are certainly wanderers among the stars. In fact the word planet has a Greek origin that's roughly evolved from what they called wandering stars.

Back then, as far as we know, no one really knew the nature of the planets except that they appeared to roam among the fixed stars in the celestial dome of heaven.

Early civilization observed that the moon as well as the wanderers or planets certainly didn't move randomly among the fixed stars but rather took about the same path among the stars, mostly migrating to the east but at times retrograding in a westward direction.

They called this path the ecliptic because it was along that path where eclipses of the sun and moon occur.

The reason all the planets and our moon pretty much take the same ecliptic path among the stars is that they along with our Earth all orbit the sun in the nearly the same geometric plane.

They also move along the ecliptic at different speeds. The planets close to the sun like Venus and Mercury are on a celestial caffeine high and they zip along the ecliptic because they whip around the sun much faster than outer planets like Uranus and Neptune that really take their sweet time completing the ecliptic circuit.

Consider the ecliptic the long and winding road in the stars. Along either side of the ecliptic are 13 constellations referred to as zodiac constellations. On any given night or day a planet or our moon will be in one of these as they travel down the ecliptic highway.

That's why Venus, Mars and Saturn appear to be in such a straight line in the western evening sky and they are most certainly on the move!

Throughout the month of July I'll give you updates on their progress and their conjunctions or what I call "celestial huggings" they have with each other.

Summer evenings are also great for spotting other wanderers in the stars — all the man-made satellites that rip across the sky in just about every direction.

We humans have shot up a bunch of devices that have degenerated into debris. When I put on my star watching parties and classes and I'm pointing out the constellations, I inevitably will hear someone call out to me, "hey, look at the satellite up there!"

Early in the evening and early in the morning are the best times to spot satellites because while the sun has gone down from our point of view on Earth, high up in space where the satellites are the sun is still above the horizon and bouncing light off them. That's what we see when we observe satellites, sunlight bouncing off their reflective surfaces.

Of course, some satellites are brighter than others. The absolute king of the satellites is the International Space Station.

At first glance it more closely resembles a high-flying jet airliner. The International Space Station is even brighter in the sky when the U.S. Space Shuttle is docked to it, but unfortunately those nights are coming to an end.

There are a lot of good websites for helping you spot and identify satellites, but I think the best one is the Heavens Above at www.heavens-above.com.

Once you get the site up and configure it to your location with the database you're good to go. Not only will it help you with satellites but it can do a lot of other neat stuff like produce rough, but still useful, star maps.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and author of the book, "Pennsylvania Starwatch," available at bookstores and at his website www.lynchandthestars.com.