As the months of summer slowly give way to those of autumn, stargazers peering due south after dark can spot one of the great celestial icons of the season: the zodiacal constellation of Sagittarius.

Sagittarius, the archer, is often imagined as a centaur: a half-man and half-horse. Ancient Greek and Roman authors often confused Sagittarius with Centaurus, a constellation farther to the southwest.

Yet the origin of Sagittarius may have come much earlier than this; the stellar figure seems to personify the Archer Nergal, a god of war inscribed on ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets. The Archer is even included as a "horse's head," or "horseman," in the 3,000-year-old zodiac of India. The human part of the figure is depicted by a fan made of a lion's tails and owned by the wife of an Indian monarch.

If you'd like to save your sanity, forget about searching the skies for such a figure and look instead for the outline of an old-fashioned teapot. Connect its bright stars with imaginary lines and you should have little trouble making out the handle, lid and spout.

Stargazers with a moonless sky far from the spillage of city lights will see a hazy cloud of "vapor" streaming upward from the teapot's spout. This is the Milky Way that seems to rise out of the southern horizon and stretch across the sky to the north.

The section of the Milky Way just above the teapot's spout marks the direction of our galaxy's center. Though no one can see its core directly because of all the gobs of interstellar material that fill the 30,000 or so light years between us and it, astronomers suspect that a super-massive black hole might lurk in this galactic core.

Binoculars aimed toward the center of the galaxy on a dark night will reveal not only countless stars, but dozens of "deep- sky objects": star clusters and gaseous nebulae. Most will appear as fuzzy splotches of light. If you have a small telescope, you can aim it toward the galactic center for an even closer look.

And right now, just to the left of the teapot's handle, the giant planet Jupiter shines brilliantly. It is, of course, very near to us — "only" about 400 million miles away — when compared with the many trillions of miles for the "background" stars.

What a wonderfully stellar way to bid adieu to summer!

To find out more about Dennis Mammana and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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