Dennis Mammana • July 18, 2026
The Great Summer Triangle | Week of July 19-25, 2026
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Week of July 19-25, 2026
We can spend our time under the stars trying to find constellation figures from mythological times, but we'll always have limited success. If we really want to see pictures among the stars, I'm afraid we need to create our own.
You may remember from previous articles that constellations are simply areas of the sky, and do not resemble their namesakes. Corvus looks nothing like a crow. Trying to find a bear in Ursa Major? Fuhgetaboutit! And Scorpius, the scorpion ... well, OK, there will always be one exception.
No, if you want to see pictures among the stars, you must invent your own. And that's where asterisms come in. An asterism is a group of stars that we connect in our imaginations to look like something.
Some of the easiest of these to create are geometrical figures. If you ever took a geometry class, you may recall that a point is the simplest of these — a figure with no length, width or depth.
In the sky, every star forms a point; connect any three of these, and you'll create a triangle. One in particular, though, is different. It's larger and brighter, and we can find it midway up in our eastern sky after dark. It's called the Summer Triangle. It's not a constellation but rather an asterism made of three stars from three separate constellations, but that doesn't mean that early storytellers overlooked this prominent star grouping.
For example, an ancient Chinese love tale tells that the star Deneb represents a magpie bridge over the Milky Way, which allows the separated lovers Altair and Vega to be reunited on only one summer night each year.
The brightest of the stellar trio — and highest in the sky this week — is Vega, the most prominent star in the constellation of Lyra, the harp. It lies 150 trillion miles from us (about 25 lightyears); in other words, the light arriving tonight from Vega began its journey toward our eyes in 2001.
The southeasternmost of the three stars is Altair, the brightest in the constellation of Aquila, the eagle. Its name comes from the Arabic Al Nasr al Tair, meaning in English "the flying eagle." Altair lies about 96 trillion miles (17 lightyears) from us. Not only is Altair one of the nearest stars, it's also one of the most rapidly spinning, completing one rotation in just 6.5 hours!
Finally, farthest to the northeast lies Deneb, marking the tail of the great swan Cygnus, more easily recognized as the Northern Cross. It's not certain, but we think that Deneb could lie as far away as 2,600 lightyears from Earth. If it's truly that distant, this star could be one of the most brilliant in our entire galaxy, with a luminosity equivalent to 200,000 suns, and would generate more light in one day than our sun has produced since the days of Marco Polo at the end of the 13th century!
With the overwhelmingly bright moonlight this week and next, the brightest stars are about all we'll be able to see, but you can still head outdoors to check out the brightest of the summer — the Summer Triangle.
Visit Dennis Mammana at dennismammana.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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