Toward the Heavens

We don't always see what we're looking at, and sometimes we stop seeing things that are always there. The summer night can be a time to pause and watch the celestial choreography, to look into the past

and to be reminded that it's all in wondrous motion. Metro's summer series continues.

The afternoon sun has barely slipped behind the mountains, and the sky is still a pale blue when the apparition begins.

At first, it's a pinpoint of light just above the western horizon. You have to stare hard and know where to look. But up on Mount Bleak, in Fauquier County, Alan Figgatt spots it and swivels his telescope.

"Got Venus!" he calls out. "Venus, anyone?"

It is not yet evening, but the planet's arrival, or apparition, as astronomers call it, tells the acolytes assembled with Figgatt that darkness is nigh, and with it the celestial kingdom of the summer night sky.

In summer, the nights are short, but for those inclined, there is time to fix the eye and the mind on the drama above. In winter, we hunch and face downward against the chill. But when the weather is sublime -- as it was one recent Saturday on Mount Bleak, in Virginia's Sky Meadows State Park -- we're open and heavenward.

Soon, with dusk falling and the squeak of crickets rising from the woods, Jupiter appears above Lost Mountain to the south.

As the clouds drift off and the sky darkens, the "summer triangle" emerges: the vast geometric arrowhead of the stars Vega, Altair and gigantic Deneb, 60,000 times brighter than our sun but 3,000 light-years away.

Arcturus, an orange-red star mentioned in the Book of Job and observed by Abraham Lincoln in the summer of 1863, is there. Also, the supergiant Antares, one of the four royal stars of ancient Persia.