Our monthly lunar intruder, the full moon, once again does a white-washing job in the night skies early this week.

Hang in there, though, because as the week goes on the moon will rise later and later in the evening and will begin shrinking to a half moon as it approaches third quarter phase.

While there's much to see in the evening sky in October, I know you're going to love the early morning predawn sky. There's a lot of great stuff up there, and this time of year you don't have to lose all that much sleep to see it, because morning twilight doesn't really get going until after 6:30 a.m.

Set that alarm, grab that cup of coffee, and be prepared to be dazzled!

I'm confident of this because in the morning sky this time of year you'll see wonderful winter constellations like Orion the Hunter and all of the other bright constellations surrounding him.

I think it's the best celestial theater of the year.

The reason we see the prime winter constellations in the early morning autumn skies has to do with Earth's daily rotation on its axis, as well as its annual orbit around the sun.

It just so happens that here in Butler we're pointing toward the same direction in space in the early morning as we do during the early evenings in January.

As the Earth orbits the sun, all of the stars in our sky rise in the east about four minutes earlier each day. So if we fast forward to January the winter constellations we see now in the mornings will be already be well above the horizon by early evening.

You'll marvel at all of the bright stars and constellations as you sip your coffee, but we also have an added attraction this week as well.

This coming Friday morning pray that we have clear skies, because the waning full moon will have a spectacular close encounter with the bright Pleiades Star Cluster. Just look in the southwest sky and you can't miss it.

At first glance you'll see a swarm of stars just to the left of the moon. With a pair of binoculars or a small telescope you'll see that the swarm of stars, known as the Pleiades, resemble a tiny Big Dipper.

The cluster is also known as the "Seven Little Sisters," named after the mythological seven daughters of Atlas, the ancient Greek god whose job was to hold up the entire world on his shoulders.

You think you have a tough job!

Astronomically the Pleiades are a group of young stars that gravitationally formed out of the same giant cloud of hydrogen gas about one hundred million years ago. Believe it or not, that would make them infant stars compared with the average lifetime of stars.

Our own star the sun is about five to six billion years old, just entering middle age.

In fact, many pictures of the Pleiades show leftover patches of their embryonic hydrogen gas shell. This extended nuclear family of stars lies about 410 light years away, or just under twenty four trillion miles from our Earthly eyes.

Along with the moon-Pleiades celestial hug, see if you can spot the planet Saturn this week in the early morning heavens. Just look for a moderately bright starlike object about twenty degrees, or two fist-widths at arm's length above the eastern horizon.

Saturn is also just below the backward question mark that makes up the chest and head of the constellation Leo the Lion in the eastern heavens.

Through even a small telescope, you can see Saturn's ring system, although the rings are nearly edge on from our view on Earth this fall. Later in 2009 they will completely disappear from our view, exactly on edge.

While Saturn's ring system is over 150,000 miles in diameter, its thickness is less than 100 feet!

The rings of Saturn are made up of billions and billions of bits from one or more of Saturn's moons that were torn to smithereens by the planet's strong tidal forces. Some of these exploded bits are as big as your house, but many are as tiny as grains of dust or small pebbles.

Later on this week, but especially next week, look for another planet rising in the east.

Just as morning twilight gets going you'll see another starlike object on the rise that's a little brighter than Saturn. That's the planet Mercury, the smallest planet in our solar system.

While Saturn is much, much larger than Mercury, the closest planet to the sun in our solar system is so bright because it's also a heck of a lot closer to us. Saturn is over 930 million miles away, but Mercury is less than 90 million miles from our wandering, and wondering, eyes.

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.