Scorpius

A beautiful and well-known constellation skitters low across the south on summer nights. It forms a distinctive hook shape, and its leading light is quite bright, so it’s easy to pick out. And it’s especially easy to find this year because two bright planets are just outside its borders.
Scorpius represents a scorpion, and it’s easy to see why. Several moderately bright stars outline a curving body that ends with a barbed stinger. And a row of stars at the top of the body forms the head. So once you find Scorpius for yourself, you won’t have any trouble coming back to it.
The scorpion’s brightest star is Antares — one of the most impressive stars in our region of the galaxy. It’s a red supergiant — it’s hundreds of times wider than the Sun, and tens of thousands of times brighter. But its surface is cooler than the Sun’s, so it looks bright orange.
Much of the scorpion’s body and tail are enwrapped in the glow of the Milky Way — the combined light of millions of stars in the disk o