The brilliant moon will continue to dominate our evening skies through the weekend. Yesterday the moon was full and there is plenty of brilliance still up there. The moon spends the weekend moving through the zodiacal constellation Leo, a constellation we associate with spring. Tomorrow night, the waning gibbous moon appears under the bright star Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation.

This is a good time to famliarize yourself with Leo. Leo is a mythological lion. Its head appears right above the moon on Sunday night and its six stars depict what also looks like a reversed question mark (?). The constellation has long been a source for mystery. To the left of the head of Leo there is the tail. Within that tail there is a cluster of galaxies tightly packed together. Astronomers call the area the "Leo Cluster." While you can't see these galaxies without a telescope, one can get excited by the fact that among astronomers this was an important area to observe. We hear so much now about the James Webb Space Telescope and its discoveries. So many more clusters of galaxies are being found in our night sky.

The Leo Cluster is 330 million light years away. In the history of astronomical exploration, the Leo constellation has long been an opening to the universe far beyond our Milky Way. The stars in the constellation you see are in our Milky Way, but the area of stars and galaxies behind them are so far beyond measure until now.