According to Greek and Roman mythology Bootes, pronounced boo-oot-tes, is a constellation that is supposed to outline the figure of a hunter chasing neighboring Ursa Major, otherwise known as the Big Bear. Instead, as you gaze upon Bootes after evening twilight in the low western skies, you'll see a giant kite with Arcturus, a very bright star, at the tail of the kite.

All summer long the kite has been a flight in the nighttime skies, but as we move toward colder times, the kite is starting to fall. This is really your last chance to see the hunting farmer/celestial kite in the evening until next spring, when it pops up in the eastern heavens.

There's no mistaking Arcturus in the sky. It's the brightest star in the evening skies right now. There are brighter starlike objects in the western sky in the vicinity of Arcturus, but they're actually planets.

In the low southwest Jupiter is still shining brightly in the early evening, and very low in the southwestern sky you may see the very bright Venus before it slips below the horizon right after evening twilight.

One surefire way to know that you're looking at Arcturus and not at one of the planets is to use the Big Dipper, which also doubles as the rear end and tail of Ursa Major. Just extend the arc of the Big Dipper's handle beyond the end of the handle and you'll run right into Arcturus. Just remember "arc to Arcturus."

A noticeably orange hue is a calling card that tells astronomers that Arcturus is a cooler star.

Star colors are subtle with the naked eye. Take a small telescope or even an average pair of binoculars and scan across any part of the sky, and you'll run into stars with various washed out shades of blue, orange, and red. Just by looking at a star's color you can tell if you are peering at a hotter star or at a cooler nuclear powered ball of gas.

Bluer stars are hotter and reddish-orange stars are cooler. It's just like when you have a campfire. The hottest part of the fire will be the inside blue flames, with the cooler orange flames on the outside, closer to where you roast your marshmallows.

Even with its orange hue, astronomers describe Arcturus as a red giant star, a bloated star that's starting to run out of hydrogen fuel at its core. The details are a little hairy, but what happens is this: as the core begins to collapse after the hydrogen is spent, heat is released into the more outer edges of the star, producing nuclear fusion and energy and forcing the star to bulge out way beyond its original size.

Arcturus is more than 25 times the diameter of our sun but it's a lot cooler than our home star, with a temperature just over 7,000 degrees. The sun is more than 10,000 degrees to the forbidding touch!

As you gaze upon Arcturus, you're looking at a star more than 212 trillion miles away and because of the speed of light, you're not seeing it as it is tonight, but as it was in 1972. Richard Nixon was still our president!

One of my favorite constellation stories is how Bootes, the kite-looking farmer, found a place in our heavens.

Bootes was a divine love child. Demeter the goddess of agriculture was Bootes' mother. Bootes' dad was a mortal man that Demeter fell in love with. The affair went on for weeks. The romance and passion were so intense that out of it, Bootes was born.

Back then it was very shameful for a god or goddess to fall in love with a mortal, much less have a child with them. Demeter had to hide her new half god, half mortal baby boy, so she arranged to have Bootes adopted by a wealthy farm family since he definitely had agricultural blood in him.

Everything was wonderful for a couple of years. Bootes had great foster parents and a wonderful older foster brother who taught Bootes how to hunt and fish.

Then tragedy struck.

Bootes' stepparents were killed in a chariot accident coming home from a New Year's Eve party.

Both Bootes and his older brother were drowning in grief. At the reading of the will a few weeks later, Bootes' older brother was appointed executor of the will to handle all of the money willed to him and his half-godly little brother. The older brother was dumbfounded by all the new cash he had at his disposal, and you know how money can change people.

Soon after, he started spending money like a drunken sailor, assuming they had those back then.

Wine, women and song took over his life, and within a few more weeks he decided to skip town with all of the loot, leaving his little brother on the farm flat broke!

Bootes was in a jam.

He had to run the farm all by himself, which was no easy task back then.

All the tilling and plowing had to done by hand and since Bootes had no cash, he wasn't able to hire workers. From before sunrise to after sunset, he toiled in the fields.

At night, when he finally got his ration of relaxation, an idea came to him.

Why not spare yourself from this beastly work by using a beast.

There were some oxen on his farm that basically laid around all day. Why not put them to work?

So Bootes used his natural godly agricultural abilities and ingenuity to design the first plow that could be pulled by an ox instead of a person.

The payoff was lightning immediate! Plowing and tilling took much less time and involved much, much less wear on his body.

The word spread quickly among the farmers in his area, who wanted Bootes to build them oxen-pulled plows to save their backs.

Then the word spread even more and in time, Bootes sold the farm and concentrated on his lucrative plow business.

He became the richest man around and lived the good life again.

The gods on Mount Olympus, including Bootes' real mother Demeter, heard of Bootes' great breakthrough and decided to reward him handsomely.

When Bootes grew old, Demeter plucked him from Earth and placed his body among the stars in the constellation we see today.

To make him even happier, she set him up in the stars in just the place where he can hunt the constellation Ursa Major, the Big Bear, every single night.

Bootes, that farmer in our skies that looks so much like a kite, definitely has a smile on his celestial face!

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 Web site www.lynchandthestars.com.