Week of March 31-April 6, 2013

This week, the moon and its obscuring light is nowhere to be found during early evening hours. It appears on the opposite side of the sky and can be seen only by insomniacs or early morning risers, so the first week of April marks a great time to get away from bright city lights and take a gander around a pristine, rural sky.

If you do this, I recommend that you sit back, relax and think carefully about what lies before you. Every light you see in the heavens is a distant sun, many hundreds of trillions of miles distant, and may be home to planetary systems and — who knows — life forms gazing in wonder into their own night sky. Each of these suns is part of our own Milky Way Galaxy: our "home star city."

Pretty remarkable! But beyond the stars we see lie other galaxies — hundreds of billions of them — that populate the cosmos far beyond the reach of the human eye.

It's true that during the autumn months can we easily spot the great Andromeda Galaxy, and from the Earth's Southern Hemisphere appear the Magellanic Clouds, two nearby galaxies entwined in a gravitational tango with our own Milky Way.

But that's pretty much it as far as galaxies go. That's as far as the human eye can see without help. Aim a small telescope skyward, however, and all that changes — especially at this time of year.

In the region of sky between the Big Dipper, Coma Berenices and Virgo lies one of the richest regions of galaxies visible to backyard telescopes. It's called the Realm of the Galaxies and it's worth an entry into your bucket list of celestial sights.

Some night when you're far from the glow of city lights, scan your telescope slowly through this area and you'll be stunned by the sight. Even an instrument of four or six inches in diameter will reveal patch after patch of fuzzy light among the much sharper stars — dozens of individual galaxies whose light left their sources when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

In the constellation of Virgo, for example, we find the famous Virgo cluster of galaxies, a system of several thousand galaxies bound together by gravitation and located some 60 or 70 million light years from the Milky Way. Though we see only the brightest as tiny fuzz balls of light, most are massive spiral and elliptically-shaped structures.

Farther to the north — in the constellation Coma Berenices, Berenice's Hair — we find the more distant Coma cluster. Lying some 400 million light-years away, this cluster is home to a thousand galaxies embedded in a region of hot gas. As the galaxies move through this material, they seem to become stripped of their own gas and dust, the raw materials out of which new stars and planetary systems are born.

So the next clear dark night, take a telescope out for a spin through the cosmos. In just one short evening, you'll be able to visit not only stars throughout our Milky Way but dozens of other galaxies across the nearby universe — a feat that would make even the great Captain Kirk envious.

Visit Dennis Mammana at www.dennismammana.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.