The springtime constellation Coma Berenices appears in the southern sky as locks of long, flowing hair. It's named after Queen Berenices, the wife of an Egyptian ruler.

There are about 66 constellations available in the heavens over Pennsylvania during the course of the year. Some are bright and some are dim. Some are big and some are small.

The springtime constellation Coma Berenices is both small and dim. Its one redeeming value is that it's one of those few constellations that sort of looks like what it's supposed to be: locks of long, flowing hair being tossed in a cosmic breeze.

I may be overselling this constellation a bit, but if you look very high in the southern sky, just shy of the overhead zenith, you will see a loose triangular cluster of stars. It may be a bit of a challenge to see Coma Berenices if you have a lot of city lighting where you are, but you should be able to find it if you're stargazing from a relatively dark site, say from the outer suburbs to the countryside. You might have to comb the high southern sky with a pair of binoculars, but you should be able to find the heavenly hair.

Coma Berenices is actually more of a star cluster than a constellation, and it's one of the closest clusters to the Earth, about 250 light years away. The heavenly hair isn't exactly down the block, though, because in miles that works out to be 14 hundred trillion miles away.

Like most open clusters Coma Berenices is a very extended family of hundreds of stars that formed out of the same gaseous nebulae about 400 to 600 million years ago. These young stars won't leave the nest —- rather, the nest will be ripped apart by gravity from other surrounding stars, and the adult stars will go their separate ways.

Coma Berenices is the only constellation named after an actual person. Queen Berenices was the wife of Ptolemy III, an Egyptian pharaoh who lived around 200 B.C.

The story goes that the great pharaoh was leading his troops into a fierce war. Queen Berenices was a very devoted spouse and prayed to the gods for his safe return. She was so desperate to see him again that she promised to cut off all of her beautiful hair if her husband returned safe and sound.

About a year later, Ptolemy returned victorious and true to her word, the queen cut off all of her hair and dedicated it to the temple of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

Just days later, some souvenir-seeking scoundrels hoisted Berenices' hair out of the temple. When the hair heist was discovered, Ptolemy and Bernices were ready to roll some heads, literally.

All of the temple priests were within hours of execution when a traveling group of Greek consulting astronomers literally saved their necks. They convinced Ptolemy and Bernices to go out with them that night to see a brand new pale cluster of lights high in the sky.

"Look!" they exclaimed, "do you not see the clustered curls of the queen's hair? Aphrodite and the other gods believed that the queen's hair was just too beautiful for a single temple to possess. Berenices' hair belongs in the heavens for all to see."

Much to the relief of the temple priests, Berenices and Ptolemy swallowed this line of bull. Consultants can be very convincing — even today.

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 his Web site, www.lynchandthestars.com.