Eagles

.....The second constellation joined by the Summer Triangle is Aquila, the Eagle.  (We move east in our examination of the constellations, and we have covered enough now to see blue constellations to the south and west, and red, or "not yet covered" mostly to the west.)  Altair, the bright star bracketed by fainter stars to the northwest and southeast, is the bottom star of the Summer Triangle, and the brightest star in Aquila.  Altair is also fairly close to Earth.  The light that you see tonight left on November 15th, 1994 (plus or minus a month).

.....Here is the "Binocular View" of most of Aquila, with the names of the named stars included.  This includes some very long names for very faint stars.  I refer to Deneb el Okab Borealis/Australis, or "The tail of the eagle north/south".  (The Arabs clearly visualized this image differently than I have drawn it here.)  Deneb el Okab Borealis has a visual magnitude of 4.00, making this one of the faintest named stars we have covered.

.....The next step, on the next go 'round, would be to have more detailed maps of the cool clusters, nebulae, galaxies, etc., to be found in Aquila especially since the summer Milky Way passes through the constellation ... but there are none to be easily found.  There are no Messier Objects, no Caldwell Objects (a list constructed by Sir Patrick Caldwell-Moore to include material Messier didn't), and the Sky Atlas 2000.0 Companion (to one of the most prominent star atlases extant) has numerous objects, with notations like "extremely faint", "not well detached", "appears stellar".  All of the cool thing in Aquila seemed to have slipped to bordering constellations.  (Sagitta, the faint constellation above Aquila, has three cool deep-sky objects.)

.....So let's digress into eagles in general.  There are a lot of stars named "Something, something eagle", because, well, eagles are cool.  Eurasia has about fifty types of eagles, while North America has two.  This was unfortunate, as the first country to become independent in North America (the United States of America) took the bald eagle as its symbol, Mexico put the golden eagle on its flag, and Canada got ... the loon.

.....Countries all over the world have used an eagle as a symbol.  This makes sense.  When you see an eagle on a flag, seal, official souvenir baseball cap, you think, "I wonder which aspect they are going for: freedom, vision, heck, even apex predator?"

.....As opposed to the alarmingly common two-headed eagle, which only brings to mind the question, "How many hit points does it have?"  (And yes, out of all my choices, I am choosing to pick on Austria-Hungary, a nation that has been defunct for coming up on a century.  You never know what people are going to get peeved over.

.....Let's sum up.  Using the symbol of an eagle (one head, left), you get this.  Use the two-headed eagle (right), you get, "Ahhhh!  AAAHHHH!  Someone protect the CHILDREN!"

The Birds of Summer

.....One of the problems that can keep people from moving from a peaceful contemplation of a dazzling array of stars to finding the dazzling variety of clusters, nebulae, and galaxies that are surprisingly accessible once you make the shift from seeing the sky as a featureless expanse of stars to recognize patterns that will allow you to find wonders hiding in plain -er- slightly assisted sight.

.....Starting in the summer (but lasting until November), three of the brightest stars in the northern sky form a (duh) triangle that covers much of the sky. This "triangle" that first appears in the "summer" sky is called the Summer Triangle because at some point, astronomers got tired of doing things like grabbing a rough pentagon of fourth magnitude stars and calling it "the giraffe"

.....The three bright stars are in three different constellations because the Summer Triangle really does cover a large selection of the sky, and ancient astronomers invented constellations to be able to break the sky into manageable pieces, so they weren't going to invent constellations that tokk up most of the sky. Well, not more than once, anyways. The three bright stars are Altair, Vega, and Deneb, in the constellations of Aquila, Lyra, and Cygnus (the next three constellations I'll write about), and you can use these to do a bit of traveling into the past. Altair, the southernmost star in the triangle, is about 16.8 light years away. This means that it has taken the light from Altair more than sixteen years of traveling through space. The light that reaches us on Friday left Altair about November 12th, 1993.

.....In the northwest, the brilliant star Vega appears to be a step brighter than Altair, but it is actually giving off more than four and a half times as much light into space than Altair does, but Altair is closer. Vega is 25.3 light years away, which mean that Friday's light from Vega left about May 2nd, 1985.

.....The third star, Deneb, is the faintest of the three as seen from Earth, but it actually gives off more than 60,000 times as much light as the Sun does. If we wanted to move Earth to Deneb and get as much light as we do now, we would have to move the Earth to be seventeen times as far away from Deneb as Pluto is from the Sun. Deneb is more than three thousand light years from our solar system, meaning that the light we see now has been traveling through space since 1218 BC, when Ramses II (the Great) was Pharoah of Egypt, and the Trojan War was going on*.

.....These three constellations will be the next three that I write about, Cygnus the swan, Aquila the Eagle, and Lyra the Lyre ... y'know, since two of these three are birds, and since I have felt no compunction about changing constellations, let go ahead and change Lyra to the Australian Lyre-bird, and have these three as as the birds of the Summer Triangle. There are a couple of small constellations that will also show up: Sagitta the arrow, located inside the Summer Triangle, and Scutum, the shield, which I will discuss along with Aquila the eagle, because Aquila has no Messier objects of its own.

* or at least this falls into the range of time in which the original Trojan War took place.