Aquila: The Eagle Has Landed

..... The southern star in the summer triangle is Altair, which means "the Eagle". (Vega, in Lyra, also means "the [Diving] Eagle.") Altair is the brightest star in the constellation Aquila (the Eagle) which is shown in the map below along with the constellations Sagitta and Scutum, which a reasonable reader at this point might conjecture mean "the Eagle" and "the Eagle", respectively, but surprisingly this turns out not to be the case.

.....Altair is the closest of the stars in the Summer Triangle, being about 16.77 light years away. The light that reaches the Earth on the night of September 20th, 2010, left the surface of Altair on December 13, 1993.

.....The constellation Aquila is a fairly large constellation in the center of the summer(/autumn) Milky Way. The view of the Milky Way in the sky even shows a split, with the Milky Way having apparently separated into two bands. This appearance is actually due to tremendous clouds of neutral hydrogen gas and dust between us and the center of our galaxy. We're looking in the direction of a tremendous number of stars, which makes it surprising that Aquila has no deep sky objects of interest in the reach of a small telescope.

.....This lack of cool stuff is why I added the constellations of Scutum and Sagitta to this map; I'm going to describe the telescopic objects in these two constellations in Aquila's place, since Aquila is easy to find, but doesn't have anything of its own.

.....This constellation also stands out to me because I now live in an area in which eagles are reasonably common sights. Just last weekend on our drive along the Mississippi to town, we saw two eagles flying over the road. Upriver in Wabasha is the National Eagle Center, located here because it is the northernmost point along the Mississippi the does not freeze over, so there are many bald eagles that winter in this area. In January and February it is possible to see dozens of eagles along the river, and I don't think that there has been any times in which I have gone there that I have not seen any eagles in wild.