When I was a kid, way back when, only Saturn had rings. The other big guys out there - Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune - were ringless balls of gas.

But then, on 10 March 1977, astronomers studying the atmosphere of distant Uranus were surprised to find blips in their data. Here's what happened.

The big planets out there are so very far away it is difficult to get much detail about them from here. So astronomers have to think of ingenious ways to bleed them of useful data.

One way is to allow distant stars to help. How? When a planet passes in front of a star the star’s light is, obviously, hidden from us. But in those moments just before it disappears behind the planet, the starlight has to pass through the atmosphere of yon planet. The waves gets distorted and certain wavelengths get kidnapped altogether. Really smart people can read the light we get - or don’t get - from the star and deduce what was in the planet’s atmosphere that ran interference.

Well, this very scenario was about to play out for three astronomers, James L. Elliot, Edward Dunham, and Douglas Mink back in 1977 when they noticed something strange. Before the star even got near to Uranus’ atmosphere, the distant star’s light dimmed and brightened, five times in total, like it was blinking on and off. Then, after the star reappeared on the other side of the planet, it did the same thing!

The only possible explanation of successive blinkings, mirrored on both sides, was that Uranus must have a tiny ring system around it, composed of at least 5 thin rings.

In fact, it did! The spacecraft Voyager 2 imaged those rings in its 1986 fly-by. They were just several kilometers thick and made of darker material than Saturn’s famous system which are the reasons why they escaped detection for so long. There are now a total of 13 known rings around Uranus.

But it wouldn't end with Uranus. In 1979, Jupiter's almost invisible rings were discovered, and in 1989 distant Neptune was caught with some.

But how those were all discovered is a story for another day.

Until next time, clear skies!

That is due to the fantastic speed of light. Traveling at over 186,000 miles a second, the light bouncing off your kids or that car or yon bird gets to your eyes so tremendously quickly that we are essentially seeing those events instantaneously.

Imagine, though, a world where light was much slower. Imagine that light travelled only a couple yards per second instead of thousands of miles. It would be a world of mass confusion. You could turn on a light and only gradually would the room come into the view in a wave of illumination. Your spouse could get up to go to the kitchen and you wouldn’t even see him get up until he was already over opening the refrigerator. Imagine the mess driving would be with slow light!

Just about anything involving movement would be such a warp of visual confusion that life as we know it would simply end. Your entire waking life would be a nightmare of delay.

Now this is never going to happen. My immediate point is that the superfast speed of light makes it seem like everything around us is true and precise, and that makes life very comfortable.

But though we are thankful for that great speed, astronomers are glad it doesn’t go faster.

If the speed of light were really instantaneous, astronomy would not have that great opportunity to see the past as it happens. Bear with me here...

Since light does have a speed limit, it does take some time for it to reach us. But it isn’t until we cough up big distances that we even notice.

The moon is far enough away that it takes light over a second to get here. Thus, we see it as it was a second ago. The sun is far enough away that it takes its light over 8 minutes to get here. Therefore, we see the sun as it used to look, over 8 minutes ago.

Go way far away, to the nearest other big galaxy, Andromeda, and we see it as it “was” over 2 million years ago. With the best telescopes, we can see well over 10 billion years ago into the past and every era in between. Studying that past, right up to the present - by watching it actually happen - helps us figure out how the Whole Show proceeded from Act I until now.

The speed of light is fast enough for a wonderful life here, but slow enough to let us watch the history of the entire creation.

So where did little February come from?

The history of the Roman calendar, the calendar from which we derive our own, is a complete mess of a story, mainly due to the extremely uncooperative natures of the sun, moon, and stars; their varying movements do not make things nice and neat. The calendar you have hanging on your wall is squeaky clean compared to what Rome first had. Ours is the end result of literally centuries of reform. Here we will focus on one small aspect of those reforms, the genesis of tiny February.

The year use to start in March - a month named for the god Mars - because that is when spring began. That the calendar year used to begin then is still reflected in our names of the latter months such as October, where “oct-” means eighth, or December, where “dec-” means tenth. Back then they really were the eight and tenth months.

It wasn’t until around 700 B.C., when the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, sat on the throne, that things changed. Pompilius plopped an extra 50 days into the calendar and two new months to fill them, specifically January and February.

It was sometime between Numa’s time and the time of the decemviri - a ruling group of ten Roman men back in the 5th century B.C. - that January and February got promoted to the first two months of the year.

January was named for the Roman god of the doorway, the two-faced Janus. We still see his name in our word “janitor” which long ago meant doorkeeper, but evolved into the more custodial meaning we have today.

February was not named for a god like March was, nor for a number like October, nor for a caesar, like July and August were. It was named for a specific rite that happened right before springtime called Februa. This very old ritual had been observed since ancient days to purify a village or city of nasty spirits. It was like a superstitious spring cleaning.

Maybe we can all take a little lesson from little February and start some cleaning up in our own lives this month. I sure could.

Until next month, clear skies!

Many of us remember that awful day in 1986 - Monday, January 28 - when the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after liftoff. Millions were watching the liftoff because of all the attention given to the “first teacher in space,” Christa McAuliffe.

All seven members aboard were killed and most likely did not die until they hit the Atlantic at over 200 miles per hour. One of the most tragic memories of that sad day was not just the actual disintegration of the shuttle itself, but watching Christa McAuliffe’s parents on national television realize that they were witnessing the death of their daughter.

You may recall it was human error that lead to their deaths. A leaky “O-ring” seal on the solid rocket booster lit into the giant external tank full of oxygen and hydrogen. Seventy-three seconds into liftoff the breach was made, the tanks were torn apart, and the rest is history.

That event was highly publicized, but few Americans know of the fate of Apollo 1 back on Friday, January 27, 1967.

Back then, the cold war was in full swing and so was our determination to “beat the Russians” in getting to the Moon. By 1966 we were readying our Apollo missions, the actual spaceflights that would take us all the way out to the Moon, land us there, and take us back. It was quite the amazingly ambitious endeavor.

The first Apollo missions were never meant to take us there; they were intended to work out the bugs of liftoff and communications and all the other annoying little things that first needed to be perfected.

Alas, the very first Apollo met with tragedy, and not in flight, but on the ground. The Command Module, packed with the three astronauts, Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee, was on the pad for nothing more than testing and training. Their compartment was pumped full of pure oxygen under higher than normal pressures, when a spark from somewhere ignited the cabin. The three astronauts were violently killed in the flash fire.

It was a preventable accident with many problems - many of them glaring - which were corrected for future Apollo missions.

Such is the nature of exploration. Some will die as pioneers to new places. The challenge is to make human error as small a factor as possible.

Let’s remember them all this week. As the plaque for the Apollo 1 victims reads, “They gave their lives in service to their country in the ongoing exploration of humankind's final frontier. Remember them not for how they died but for those ideals for which they lived.”

Sadly, what I was looking at was one of the major nemeses of modern astronomy, and I'm not referring to the clouds.

The clouds have always been with us, they are part of the natural order of things and something sky lovers have always had to deal with. No, the latest archenemy of astronomy is not the fact that there are clouds, but that in the middle of a moonless night we can see them, white against a dark background.

It is what illuminates them that astronomers despise so much. The light pouring out from the cities, spoiling our skies, is what has many of us up in arms.

It is a true statement that we need some light at night as a measure of safety. Obviously, headlights help us see where we are driving, and streetlights help give our streets some semblance of security. A lit parking lot makes it easier to find our cars and makes it less tempting for bad people to do bad things. But here are some questions I have for which I have yet to hear good answers…

Do we really need to light up huge auto malls at night after hours? Is it important that everyone within a 50-mile radius of a casino has to see it? Do billboards really have to be lit from the bottom up by spotlights that could light up a passing DC-10? Is it necessary for that one neighbor across the street to have a mercury vapor lamp that literally lights half the block like the midnight sun?

The fact that we see those clouds on moonless nights means that a lot of our precious energy is uselessly bleaching our atmosphere or being jettisoned out into space. What waste!

The extent of light pollution we are seeing is unprecedented in human history. It is estimated that about two-thirds of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way! Our present generation is missing out on the spectacle of the star-studded night sky and becoming that much more desensitized to the beauties of the creation.

Do you think this year that you could help in your own small way by turning off outdoor lights when they are not needed? Can you buy lighting fixtures that only deliver light downwards where it is needed? There are all kinds of other ways to help darken our skies found at the website of the International Dark-Sky Association (www.darksky.org).

Let's reclaim our nighttime skies!

Well, that all has to stop. Investing even a small amount of time at the simplest levels of astronomy will help one begin to understand the cosmos and seed answers to the great questions of why we are here and where we are going.

Since this is the season that we celebrate the coming of a new year, and often resolve to change something in that coming year, I thought it might suit us all well to commit to trying a few astronomical things this year; simple things to help one get going in an investigation into the workings of the universe. Here are a few ideas.

Idea #1: Get thee to a star party. There are astronomy clubs willing to let you attend one of their evening gatherings of star gazing which are often open to the public. Let a "backyard astronomer" - a person without a Ph.D. but who often knows the skies better than one who has one - show you the skies. The Moon, the planets, nebulae, star clusters are all out there for the taking. Take a trip through the skies with them.

Idea #2: Resolve this year to look through a telescope. Probably someone you know owns one. Of course, a star party is filled with them. And telescope stores like Oceanside Photo and Telescope often have them set up in front. Take your family out and take a look; it's addicting.

Idea #3: Subscribe for just a year to a magazine like Sky and Telescope or Astronomy. More and more, these image-filled magazines are catering to the layman in all things heavenly. And after a year you will be "in the loop" regarding the latest in astronomical hot topics.

Idea #4: Latch on to one of those astronomy calendars. Inside you will not just find great pictures, but dates marking important events throughout the year, like meteor showers and planetary alignments.

Idea #5: Check out sites like hubblesite.org and Astronomy Picture of the Day. Websites like these are more than jaw-dropping eye candy. They also explain what those intriguing images are all about, and help get the curiosity juices a-flowin'.

Those are just five quick suggestions for how you can start wading deeper into this amazing world of astronomy. There are plenty more. Start wherever you will - but start.

Until next time, clear skies - and the happiest of new years!

Yes, it's all a little irritating, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I know the solstice is upon us and things will be better.

The winter solstice, which arrives on the 21st of December, is not just a human calendar event. It is an astronomical one first.

Our planet and its orbit are oriented to the sun in such a way that allows us our annual spectrum of seasons. Regular readers here will remember that when we are tilted most towards the sun we have the summer solstice. Daytimes are longest, the sun rises highest in the sky and there is a warming trend in the weather.

The equinoxes - both spring and fall - are when we are tilted neither away nor towards the sun. There is equal daytime from pole to shining pole.

But after September when we in the northern hemisphere are beginning to tilt away from the sun - when the sun rises and sets farther south, stays up for shorter periods of time, and never gets too high in the sky - it is then that things change for us both in the physical realm of nature and in our human experience.

Most people in the northern hemisphere experience a change in weather. It is colder, darker, and the weather often goes "bad." Our life-giving sun is giving us the impression that it is about to leave and not come back.

You can imagine what ancient peoples thought about this threat of a departing sun. Not knowing that the sun was a ball of hydrogen and helium but fully aware of the role it played in life, there evolved rituals at this time of the year either imploring the sun to return or celebrating the fact that it would.

Solstice, which loosely translates as "the sun as stopped," happens at just the right time for us, before the sun gets too close to the horizon. After that date, the sun begins to rise again higher in the sky each day, the lands begin to warm again, the light lasts longer.

My hope is that this solstice season is a reminder to all of us who fear the dark, and feel our situation at the moment is bleak and hopeless. It won't keep getting darker, the life-giving sun is coming back!

It is not just its brilliance that makes it stand out; there is also what appears to be a twinkling of color emanating from it. Why is Sirius so very bright and what’s up with that multicolor twinkling.

Sirius belongs to the stellar spectral class A. In astrospeak, that means it is big and nasty and hot and dangerous but not too big and nasty and hot and dangerous. It is only a couple times bigger than our sun, a bragging point to be sure, but Sirius is not big enough to belong to the Death by Supernova club.

It will, in the next eon or so, graduate to a red giant, only to whimper out as a white dwarf, a fate similar to our sun’s.

What makes Sirius so bright is its proximity. It is a mere 8.6 light years away, essentially down the street. This short distance allows it to be the brightest star in our skies, and, from our vantage point in Southern California, the closest visible star. (Alpha Centauri, at 4.4 light years, is visible to people more southerly than we.)

What allows it, and all other stars, to twinkle is not a property of Sirius, but of our atmosphere.

Our ocean of air is one turbulent, violent place with hot air rising and cool air sinking all around - and not just at the humungous cloud-size scale. There are micropockets of air out there of varying temperatures. Our atmosphere is no smooth, tranquil place.

Here is the twinkle connection. When light travels through different substances, even if it is the same substance at different temperatures, it can change direction - it is refracted. You have seen this when light passes through eyeglasses; the light's path is bent. Even the different colors within light get redirected at different angles.

Bottom line? A nice, bright, passive beam of light from Sirius gets throttled when it goes through our turbulent atmosphere. The light seems to bounce around and can even get separated into its component colors.

You see now why it is desirable for astronomers to get their telescopes as high above the disturbed atmosphere as possible, even sending them into orbit above the planet.

Though not conducive to good science, a brilliant, twinkling Sirius does appeal to the poet in us. Go out and see it in the next months in the southeastern skies as it follows Orion. It's a dazzler.

I do the same now, only the dancing bodies I observe are in the skies. You can join me in the bleachers in the next several weeks as I watch two heavenly dancers, Jupiter and Venus trip the light fantastic.

In the southwest skies after sunset you will notice two extra bright "stars." The brightest by far is Venus, the dimmer is Jupiter. They are both on a similar course around the sun as we. Only Venus is on an inside fast track, and Jupiter is way out in a slowpoke lane.

Those track assignments unwittingly result in the dance we can see in the next weeks. Venus is currently making a turn around the sun trying to lap us again on the inside. She will, but it will take several more months to do it.

Her attempt to catch up with us will make her appear higher and higher in the sky each evening as she rounds the sun. Now hold that thought.

Jupiter is so slow that our own planet is now about to traverse to the opposite side of the sun as the Big Guy, making him appear to get closer to the backside of the sun in our evening skies.

Put these to movements together, Venus' uphill climb and Jupiter's downward fall and the two will appear to be getting closer to each other daily, passing by each other by the end of the month.

You will know when they are at their closest because a young crescent chaperone Moon will be right there on the dance floor to break them up on the last day of November, and the first of December.

There really is no need for the Moon to police their dance moves. They are nowhere near each other in reality. Jupiter is actually almost 450 million miles away from the bright temptress, way too far be entranced by her charms.

For those of you with telescopes, these are your last days to see Jupiter and his satellites for a while. They will soon disappear into the glare of the sun. But you can watch Venus as she approaches us, getting larger in the field of view as days go by.

Venus and Jupiter won't put on this nice of a display until 2010/2011. So if you have a chance in the next weeks, go sit up in the bleachers and be entertained.

Until next time, clear skies!

Right after sunset, in the 5 o'clock hour, look to the southern skies and see that the sun, Moon, and two bright dots form a sort of line across that part of the sky. The two bright dots are the superbright Venus, and dimmer Jupiter, nearer the Moon.

Notice also, in the next couple days, how the Moon seems to extend that make-believe line out across the southern skies. And, if they were bright enough, you would observe that both Neptune and Uranus are on that same line, over towards the southeast.

This imaginary line that circles the earth is called the ecliptic. Hugging this line one can find all the planets, the sun, and the Moon. You will never find any of these solar system objects straying more than a few degrees from it.

What is this line? And what does it mean?

Pretend your favorite crazy uncle is in the middle of a lake, just bobbing gently up and down, dressed in an oversized, inflatable yellow bathing suit and pretending to be a sun. Around him at various distances are tiny family members, including you, swimming around him. None are flying overhead, none are diving below; they are all stuck on the same flat plane, the surface of the lake. From your perspective as a wannabe planet, your uncle and all the other wee swimmers around you can all describe a giant encompassing circle.

That is analogous to what our solar system is like. Only the planets are not floating on a lake to keep them all nicely leveled. But they are all on a disk-like plane on their trip around the sun. Why are they all that way? Here's what we think.

All those planets residing on the same plane going in the same direction is strong evidence that they all formed from the same whirling cloud of dust and gas sometime in the distant past. We see similar flattened disks choked with dust and gas around distant baby stars implying planets may be forming there now as you are reading this.

That ecliptic is not just pretty cosmic geometry; it is evidence for how it all started.

Until next time, clear skies!

The reason I bring it up now is because it was this week, 28 years ago, that a spacecraft landed there and snapped the first pictures of the Venusian surface, an amazing feat of engineering and perseverance. Why? I thought you'd never ask!

First, sending a spacecraft anywhere is an awesome accomplishment. It has become pretty commonplace now with missions currently to Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and even tiny Pluto, so we take it almost for granted. But putting a car-sized laboratory on a rocket and firing it into space at exactly the right speed and direction to arrive at a place millions or billions of miles away, months or years later, and land in exactly the right spot - that is worthy of more than a pat on the back.

But a trip to Venus has its own extra bucket of angst. Not only do you have to get there perfectly, you have to land on its surface. And Venus' surface is nothing like what we have here or even on tiny Mars. It is hellish.

In the days of old - early last century - it was believed that the surface of Venus might be paradisiacal. The planet was covered with clouds, so there must be water there - probably oceans! And of course, in the eyes of many even today, water on a rocky planet means life.

Well, it turned out the paradise was more like a purgatory. Those clouds turned out not to be water, but sulfuric acid, the stuff of battery acid. And the atmospheric pressures below the cloud cover ballooned to about 90 atmospheres, which means about 90 times what we have on earth's surface.  You know how diving to the bottom of a pool makes your ears hurt from the pressure of the water? Imagine diving over a half mile deep into the ocean. Those are the pressures you get on Venus just by standing on the surface.

And it turned out the temperature was not just toasty warm, it was hot enough, at over 800 degrees Fahrenheit, to melt lead. So attempting to land anything on Venus meant battling corrosive acids, crushing pressures and metal-melting temperatures. No easy task.

But those competitive friends of ours from the Soviet Union took on that task in a series of missions spanning over two decades, from the early 60's to the 80's, in a program called Venera.

Those of us growing up during that time know that we were competing with them in everything, including any type of space flight, manned or not. They won many of the competitions, including first spacecraft in orbit and first human in orbit. We stole the show with the first man on the moon in 1969.

But the Venera program gave the Soviets several other "firsts." The Venera missions alone were first to enter another planet's atmosphere, first to land safely on another planet, and, in the event we mark here in this week's column, the first to send back pictures from another planet.

It was Venera 9 that sent back a few black-and-white pictures of the scorched surface of Venus before the spacecraft itself was consumed by the heat and pressure less than an hour after it landed. A belated congratulations to the Soviet engineers on a job well done!

Plans to revisit the Venusian surface are in the works but launch dates are unknown. Right now it is "study from above," in orbit around the planet and safe from ungodly conditions below.

Next time you see Venus - like on the 31^st when it is near the crescent Moon - take in its dazzling beauty. But also give thanks that you are seeing it from the surface of an amazingly gifted - and safe - planet.

For as long as man has looked up into the skies it had always appeared that we were at the center of all there was. It wasn't for some self-centered reasons that we came to that conclusion; it was because it really looks that way. We on earth feel no movement, but we see everything seemingly moving around us. We must, therefore, be at the center of a giant sphere of starry hosts.

That belief took a big hit in the 16^th and 17^th centuries when our worldview changed to one in which our planet, and all other planets and stars, orbit around something else - our sun. This was the great time of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo.

Time continues on, and with the invention and improvement of the telescope it was revealed that there are countless stars out there in all directions. Gradually, after decades of refining and reinterpreting our observations, it became the accepted view that our galaxy, our island universe, was all there was. We were a planet orbiting a star, and our star was a mere grain of sand in a giant starry sandbox.

And that was it. Beyond our sandbox was the void.

By the end of the 19^th century, people started seeing things in their telescopes which were curiously like miniature versions of what we thought the entire Galaxy might look like. Were these spiral-shaped clouds - called nebulae - merely new stars being born, or were they distant galaxies like our own? If new stars, then our view of the galaxy remains safe. If  distant galaxies, then a new paradigm shift awaits offstage ready for an entrance that will put a whole new plot twist in the Grand Scheme of Things.

You see, if they are distant galaxies then the universe is unimaginably bigger than anyone ever thought, and our galaxy would be just one of innumerable other galaxies. For some this would have deep philosophical implications.

If there was just some way to see more detail in those "nebulae" this problem would have an answer. As scopes were getting bigger, more detail could be seen, and some astronomers swore they saw stars in the swirls which would reckon them as distant galaxies, not local clouds.

It wasn't until Edwin Hubble came along that this debate was put to rest. Eighty-five years ago, using the 100-inch telescope at Mt Wilson, he photographed a minuscule pulsating star called a Cepheid variable in the Andromeda Nebula.

A Cepheid variable is a star that pulsates in brightness with great regularity. To make a long story short, knowing the pulse rate of a Cepheid can tell us how bright it should be. When we see how bright it appears to our eyes, and see how much it has dimmed with distance, we can use simple laws of physics to determine how far away it is.

Hubble used his calculations to show the world that the Andromeda nebula was nowhere within our galaxy, that it was at least a million light years away. It was no cloud, it was the Andromeda Galaxy.

Suddenly, overnight, the entire universe was seen to be immense, larger than anyone had ever dreamed, and strewn throughout not with just billions of local stars, but billions of other galaxies. We were a mere speck in a boundless landscape.

Not to despair! Although some now took the view that our new size relative to the new universe made us insignificant, that view has been changing over the last decades.

We now see that the universe must be the size it is, must be as dense as it is, must have as many stars and galaxies and voids as it does - no more, no less - for us to have life on this tiny little planet of ours. Why? Sorry, that is a discussion for another day.

Want to read a great book on the fascinating history of astronomy from Aristotle to modern day? Pick up Timothy Ferris' Coming of Age in the Milky Way.

Until next time, clear skies!

Three of these guys get the big press. The spring equinox is a traditional "first day of spring." Several high holidays, like Passover and Easter, are embraced around this time. The summer solstice gets credit as the first day of summer and is fêted as the "longest day." And winter solstice finds itself fully immersed in tradition and ritual for as far back as we have records. Peoples throughout the northern hemisphere have made that time into a time of great celebration and/or revelry.

Then we have the forlorn, almost unnoticed fall - or autumnal - equinox. We celebrate this event on Monday, but with about as much fanfare as the coming of the new phonebook. So, in our continued attempt to occasionally focus here on the so-called "less important" things, let's take a closer look at this fall equinox.

First, though, we have to understand what on earth a solstice or equinox is. This is going to take into account two of Earth's motions: its orbit around the sun and its tilt. Ready?

You know that our planet revolves around the sun in about 365 days. Moreover, we rotate on an axis once every 24 hours. But the axis of our spin is not perpendicular to the plane of our orbit around the sun - we are tilted over with respect to it. Our spin axis doesn't give a tinker's cuss for the sun; it is lined up with the North Star, Polaris, for as long as we all shall live.

This tilt allows us in the northern hemisphere to sometimes be tilted towards the sun, sometimes away. When we are tilted towards we have the long, hotter days of summer. When tilted away we have shorter days and the weather cools. We are tilted most toward the sun on the summer solstice, most away at the winter solstice.

But it follows that sometime between the days that we are tipped towards the sun and those we are tipped away, there must be a time we are not angled over at all with respect to the sun. These are the equinoxes. We have one of those at the end of March, and one now.

On the equinox the sun will shine on earth from pole to pole. The sun will rise due east, be up for 12 hours, set due west, then be down for twelve. The "daytime," however, will not be really equal to nighttime as the name equinox implies. There are several hi-tech reasons for this inequality which take into account the specifics of true horizon, the size of the sun, and atmospheric refraction, and so on.

But the most obvious reason that daytime wins over nighttime on the equinox is because of twilight, that time before the sun rises and after it sets when the sun still lightens the skies. In Southern California the twilight brackets the "day" for about an extra hour before and after the sun is up.

But at the poles thing are not so ordinary on this day. You might remember from school that on the equinox a person standing at the equator at solar noon will see the sun directly overhead. But put yourself at a pole and you'll see the sun actually going around the horizon like a great blinding ball of light all day long. At the North Pole these are the last days to see the sun for a while as the earth now tilts away from our star causing it to slowly sink below horizon. All this puts the pole in a creepy twilight until we are tilted so far over that from November until January it is nighttime all day long there.

There are precious few holidays on the planet that celebrate this day. Maybe you can start one, one which is filled with thanks for the beautiful fact that our planet is not always lined up perpendicular to the sun. Initiate a holiday that celebrates our whole array of seasons and changing weather and varied climates and maximal living area on this planet, all effects which find their cause in the perfect tilt of our planet.

But there are others - actually many others - we have not heard of, much less seen up there. These tiny collections of stars are like bit actors in the Big Scene, filling in the celestial sphere while we focus on the big "stars."

Well, in honor of those disenfranchised constellations, we are going to take a look at four of them which are right above our heads tonight: Vulpecula, Sagitta, Delphinus, and Equuleus. Let's bring them into the spotlight. (I have uploaded a star chart of all four at firstlightastro.com/TheFour.jpg to make it easier to follow along.)

We will use a famous asterism to help set our frame of reference, the Summer Triangle.  Go outside in the next few nights during the 9 o'clock hour and face south. Look almost directly above your head. There are three extremely bright stars outlining the great Triangle. The one most southerly, the "bottom" of our triangle, is Altair. And it is in the bottom half of this triangle that we find our first two constellations: Vulpecula and tiny Sagitta.

Vulpecula (Latin for little fox) is a tough one to see in light-polluted skies. It's brightest stars are about 4^th magnitude, meaning if you are in a city of blinding lights you will not see the faint fox. In an historical perspective, no one saw the fox until the 17^th century when the astronomer Johannes Helvelius put it there. Actually he placed a fox and a goose there, but the fox apparently devoured said goose because it is no longer a part of the constellation. For some reason, only the sly fox remains.

You have a better chance of seeing Sagitta. It is one the smallest constellations in the sky but is accented by two "sort of" bright stars just north of bright Altair, inside our triangle's bottom. Those two stars make up The Arrow, which is what Sagitta means in Latin. Where the arrow comes from is a matter of conjecture. One story has it that the arrow is from nearby Hercules and headed for the eagle, Aquila. Its popularity as an arrow is not just a Graeco-Roman thing, either; the Persians and Hebrews put one there, as well.

Now we leave the triangle. Just to the left of the bottom of the triangle and bordering the Fox and the Arrow is Dephinus, the dolphin. This one you can see on a clear night, and it actually looks rather like a dophin! Go figure.

A little to the east of Altair is the dim quadrangle of stars that make up the dolphin's body, with a star dangling out for its tail. Many cultures place a dolphin or fish there, but the quad itself is also called Job's Coffin. To be sure, the stars look like a coffin, but why "Job's" coffin is a mystery.

And finally, the second tiniest of all the western constellations and one of the most unknown: Equuleus, the Little Horse. Just to the southeast of Delphinus, it is so nondescript I cannot even tell you how to find it other than to refer to the star chart.

That it exists at all is truly a wonder. Why the ancients consecrated just a handful of the dimmest stars in the sky as an official constellation is a puzzle. Is the Little Horse related to giant Pegasus next door? Is it part of some other lesser myth? Why wasn't it just tacked on to a nearby constellation like Delphinus? It could have been The Dolphin in its Froth of Tiny Bubbles.

Learn anything new? Hope so. Anything that may get you money on Jeopardy? Probably not. But if you find yourself a little more interested in the skies above, good for all of us.

Until next time, clear skies!

1. I learned that most stars up there have companion stars orbiting them, but thankfully we do not.

Stars are born in huge nurseries and as a result have dozens to hundreds of nearby siblings. Most of them end up gravitationally bound to another, some so close they nearly touch. Some star systems up there are triplets, some quadruplets, some quintets. There are even sextets.

Our star is the equivalent of an only child. Its brothers and sisters have long since left home. But that's a good thing. This way we have no other nearby stars knocking us off our very delicate orbit around our life-giving sun. But we are a minority. Most stars above have sibs.

2. I learned that the nearest star beyond the sun is not alpha Centauri!

Most people incorrectly say that alpha Centauri is our nearest neighbor at a distance of 4.37 light years. But alpha Centauri has what we believe to be a little brother, proxima Centauri, that is slightly closer to us at 4.2 light years. But proxima is a red dwarf star, meaning it is small and dim, with an apparent magnitude of near 11. Translation: Don't even bother looking unless you have a telescope; you will not see it. But however dim it may be, it is closer.

3. I learned that the biggest volcano in the solar system is not on earth, it's on Mars!

We have some mighty big volcanoes on this planet. We all awe at Vesuvius and St. Helens and Pinatubo and Soufrière and their explosive destructiveness. Our biggest volcano, though, is the relatively docile Mauna Loa on the big island of Hawaii. It rises nearly 14,000 feet above sea level, and from its submarine base to its high-altitude peak it is more than 3000 feet taller than Everest. And it is made of more than 15,000 cubic miles of rock. It is capital-B big.

But there is one still bigger - much bigger. On Mars there is a volcano called Olympus Mons. This guy is a heavyweight, one that makes our volcanoes look like dust bunnies. It rises to a mind-numbing 88,500 feet above the Martian surface and stretches more than 340 miles across. But why does Mars get the big guy and we do not?

Mars has no plate tectonics so volcanoes there in days gone by would grow and grow without plates shifting and reshaping and pulling them under. And Mars' gravity is less so, believe it or not, its volcanoes can grow much higher. 

4. There is gravity in space!

Surprise! A very common misconception is that in space there is no gravity. Things just float about. Well, not exactly. Everything that has mass has gravity. That means you and I and your dog and that TV remote over there all have gravity. And a body doesn't run out of gravity after a certain distance; gravity merely diminishes with distance. So, in a very literal sense, all things in the visible universe are attracted to one another. Gravity fills space.

But far away from a planet or star the gravity is so slight that it almost appears to vanish. But it's there! You will fall towards something. This all-pervasive force is how planets orbit around stars, and how stars orbit around galaxies.

Learn anything new? Hope so. To all students out there, young and old, have a great school year! Teachers, too!