On the next clear August evening, be sure to look up in the sky and enjoy the brilliant blue-white star Vega shining down at you, the beacon of Northern Hemisphere summer.

This star is the fifth brightest in the night sky, magnitude 0.03. It is also one of the closest stars, a hair over 25 light years away. For astronomers that is close, yet it is still roughly 147 trillion miles from the Sun. Imagine how intrinsically bright the star must be, to shine so bright and be so far away.

Some stars are even brighter beacons. Another bright summer star, Deneb, is to the upper left from Vega (when Vega is sue south). It's not much dimmer, a bright magnitude +1.25 and yet it is an outstanding 2,600 light years away. To the lower right of Deneb and below (south) of Vega is another bright star, Altair, magnitude 0.77 and the closest of the three at 17 light years.

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Vega, the brightest star of the constellation Lyra the Harp; Deneb, the brightest of Cygnus the Swan; and Altair, the lucida of Aquilia the Eagle, form a large triangle popularly known (but not very imaginatively) as the Summer Triangle.Physical space of course is in three dimensions, and although the stars look like they are all pasted on an inverted black dome over our heads (like being under an umbrella in the daytime with many little holes letting in the light), the stars are all at different distances. Ancient sky observers viewed the Universe like being inside a "celestial sphere" with Earth at the center, the stars being the same distance.

Unlike the triangle we see from our two-dimensional perspective, the actual triangle they make is long and deep. Cosmically speaking, Vega and Altair aren't that much different in how far they are from us, but Deneb is way in the background.

As seen from Wayne County, Pa. where I write this, Vega appears due south and nearly overhead at about 10 p.m. EDT, Saturday, August 20. The star actually reaches about three degrees from zenith. It passes directly overhead about three degrees in latitude south of here, in North Carolina.

Interestingly, Vega is scheduled to be the "North Star" in the year 13,727. That's a long time from now. The star we consider as the "North Star" very slowly changes due to what is known as precession of the equinoxes. It is the term for the regular wobble of the Earth's axis of rotation.

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The axis points at the "North Celestial Pole (NCP)" on the sky, currently very near the star Polaris, at the end of the Little Dipper. As our world takes its daily spin, the whole sky seems to revolve around the NCP (and the "South Celestial Pole" as well). As it wobbles, the axis makes a large imaginary circle on the sky once approximately every 26,000 years, bringing other stars like Vega slowly into the honored place as the brightest star near the NCP. The last time Vega was the North Star was around 12,000 BC.

Vega spins very fast, once every 12.5 hours, giving it an oblate shape. The star is 2.73 times the radius of the Sun.

Lyra the Harp is a very interesting, little constellation. Four of its other stars form a parallelogram, sort of a leaning rectangle; as seen in the south, this pattern seems to hang below Vega. About half way between the two stars at the far end there is an amazing little "donut" shaped cloud, visible in even a small telescope. This is the famed Ring Nebula, otherwise listed as M57. In just a telescope of three-inch aperture at about 60x it will look like a tiny patch, not exactly round. Boost the magnification a bit and you can detect the hole in the center. Bigger telescopes show it better.

M57 is a so-called planetary nebula. This type of nebula is formed when an aged star blows off an enormous, luminous envelope of ionized gas surrounding it. In doing so, the once giant star has shrunk to the dim "white dwarf" stage.

Small telescope users also enjoy Epsilon Lyrae, a double star near Vega which at higher magnification is revealed to be not a system of two stars, but four. Another fascinating star for the telescope in Lyra is T Lyrae, which is intensely red and varies in brightness.

Perhaps best of all is beautiful Vega, which anyone with the gift of sight may enjoy— by just looking up.

Keep looking up at the stars!