A great summer star tells us where we’re going
This past weekend was the swan song for spring 2026 as summer astronomically kicked off very early Sunday morning, June 21, at 4:24 a.m.
It’s formally known as the Summer Solstice, the time the sun reaches its most northern position. That means the sun takes the highest arc across our sky, providing us with a maximum of 15 hours and 36 minutes of official daylight, from sunrise to sunset.
On Summer Solstice day, the sun achieves a midday altitude of 68½ degrees above the southern horizon around here, allowing you to cast your shortest shadow of the year.
With the longest day of the year, that, of course, means the shortest night over Butler, resulting in stargazers taking a real beating this time of year. It’s a late-night affair that’s also aggravated by longer evenings and morning twilights in our northern latitude.
The farther north you go in Pennsylvania, the more twilight there is. Just a hundred miles north can make quite a difference.
With as much as an hour of twilight either side of sunset and sunrise, we’re down to about six-and-a-half hours of quality stargazing. You have to make what little time you have really count! The bad or good news here — depending on your perspective — is that we’re already gradually losing daylight and gaining stargazing time.
On these summer evenings when it’s finally dark enough, look for a really bright star in the eastern sky, about halfway between the horizon and the overhead zenith. That’s the star Vega, the third brightest nighttime star we can see around here.
It also serves as the brightest star in the tiny constellation Lyra, the Lyre or Harp. Over 90% of the people I know pronounce it like the ill-fated Chevrolet car in the 1970s, but others insist you pronounce it “Vee-ga.” However you pronounce it, Vega is a significant star — not so much because of the star itself, but because of where it is in our night sky.
Vega is a massive star, almost 2 million miles in diameter, more than twice that of our sun. Its surface temperature is 17,000 degrees — about twice that of the sun.
The main reason it’s so bright in our sky is that it’s relatively close compared to the other stars we see at a glance. It’s about 26 light-years away, with just 1 light year equaling nearly 6 trillion miles. A light year is defined as the distance light travels in a year, so at 26 light-years, the light we see from Vega tonight left that star in 2000, when the TV show “Friends” was still going strong.
What really makes Vega significant for us is that it marks the direction of what astronomers call the “solar apex.” That’s the direction in which the sun is traveling through space as it orbits around our Milky Way galaxy.
Our sun is just one of at least 300 billion to 400 billion fellow stars in the spiral shaped galaxy that spans 100,000 light-years in diameter.
The sun is dragging the Earth — and the rest of our solar system — in the general direction of Vega at a breakneck speed of 140 miles per second. We, of course, can’t feel the motion because it’s a constant speed, like cruising in jet airliner.
Even though it is moving and grooving along at over a half a million miles an hour, it’ll still take about 225 million years to make one orbit around the center of our home galaxy.
So, when someone asks you just where this world is really going, take them out in your backyard and point them in the direction of Vega.
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is also the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and at adventurepublications.net. Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.
