GREETINGS everyone! We’ll have a waxing Moon in our sky for most of the week, but even the Moon’s light won’t stop you from finding the two bright planets in our early evening sky. Just watch one of our beautiful sunsets and then go back out at about 7:50 p.m. (that’s one hour after sunset). About five fist-widths above the western horizon you’ll see a small triangle of bright stars. Two of them are not stars; they’re Mars and Saturn. It’s pretty easy to figure out which one is Mars because it will be noticeably red. Saturn is the upper “star” of the triangle. Find Mars and Saturn tonight because they’re headed for an incredible rendezvous later this month.

If you turn 90 degrees to your left as it begins to grow dark, you can still spot Crux the Southern Cross. It's on its side in the southwest now and will disappear from our evening skies by the middle of August. Those two very bright eyes to the left of the Cross are Alpha and Beta Centauri, the third and tenth brightest stars. The left one, Alpha Centauri, is the closest star to the Sun.

If you look to the left of and below Alpha and Beta Centauri, you’ll find a fairly bright constellation that's completely unknown to northern stargazers because it's too far south to see. It's called Triangulum Australe the Southern Triangle and it's due south this week. It's also directly opposite the Little Dipper which is balancing on its handle above Polaris the North Star. The Little Dipper or Ursa Minor the Little Bear, to give it its proper name, is a very dim constellation that's famous only because it contains Polaris.

July is also the best month to see another dim constellation. First, find the Little Dipper and then look up and to the right. You should see a small triangle of stars above and about midway between the Little Dipper’s bowl and the bright star Deneb. That triangle is the head of a fearsome beast: Draco the Dragon. The Dragon’s body loops down to the right side of the Little Dipper and then arches over it to end between the Little Dipper and the Big Dipper in the west. If you use the end stars of the Little Dipper's bowl as pointers, they’ll point you to a star in the Dragon’s tail. That’s Thuban, the pole star of the ancient Egyptians.

Earth wobbles very slowly on its spin axis and one big circle in the sky takes 26,000 years to complete, so don't expect much change in your lifetime. Polaris has been close to the spin axis point for about 700 years and will be as close as it will get on March 24 in the year 2100. About 6,000 years ago, the spin axis point was near Thuban, that star in the Dragon's tail. The main passage in the Great Pyramid of Cheops is aligned to point to Thuban.

About 13,000 years from now, the bright star Vega will be the North Star, though Vega will never be as close to the spin point as Polaris and Thuban. Vega is that bright star high in the northeast and if you find Polaris, Thuban and Vega, you get an idea of just how much Earth wobbles as it spins.

There is no South Pole star right now, but as the spin axis precesses, several stars will take their place as the South Pole star over the next 26 millennia. None of them are as bright as Polaris and Vega, however. The other planets have pole stars too. The north pole of Uranus points to a star in Ophiucus called Sabik that's almost as bright as Polaris. See if you can find Polaris, a dragon and the pole star of the Egyptians tonight.