Joe Rao is Space.com's skywatching columnist, as well as a veteran meteorologist and eclipse chaser who also serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmers' Almanac and other publications. Joe is an 8-time Emmy-nominated meteorologist who served the Putnam Valley region of New York for over 21 years. You can find him on Twitter and YouTube tracking lunar and solar eclipses, meteor showers and more. To find out Joe's latest project, visit him on Twitter.
An illustration of the June night sky showing how the stars of Ursa Major/the Big Dipper can be used to locate Spica and Arcturus.Most astronomy guides refer to Bootes as resembling a longish kite. To me, however, he has always looked a lot more convincing as an ice cream cone. Considering that we are now at that time of the year when ice cream trucks visit most neighborhoods around suppertime, the ice cream cone reference seems more preferable compared to a kite.
As to what flavor concoction is in the cone, that's easy. Someone bit off the bottom of the cone and that's where a glob is poking out. To locate the third star of our Spring Triangle, Denebola, go back to the Big Dipper and pretend that the bowl is filled with water.
Literally thousands of galaxies have been photographed here with great observatory telescopes. If you own a good reflecting telescope of at least 6-inch aperture or greater, a sweep of this region will reveal literally dozens of these galaxies appearing as a myriad of faint and fuzzy patches of light. This is the only great cloud of galaxies that is available to the average amateur.
And keep this mind: This cluster or cloud of galaxies is the nearest of the large aggregations of galaxies relative to our own. The best estimates indicate that the majority of these"island universes" are located somewhere between 40 and 70 million light-years from us.
So it is that the Realm of the Galaxies, the nearest and brightest of its kind, transforms the seemingly uninteresting region within the Spring Triangle into one of the most remarkable in the entire sky!
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