From the northern hemisphere, summer is the time for Cygnus, the swan, to fly high in our skies. A large constellation, it is definitely one of the finest on show in the northern sky.
Cygnus is shaped like a cross but it doesn’t take much imagination to see it as a swan. The central star in the constellation is Sadr. From this point, the swan’s great neck stretches out towards the star Albireo, and the body back towards Deneb, which is Arabic for tail. The wings reach out to either side along a line of fainter stars. The body and neck of Cygnus lie right along the Milky Way, the misty band of light that can be seen from more rural locations and is the combined light from the billions of stars that make up our galaxy.
Cygnus itself is identified in several places within Greek mythology but perhaps the most apposite is the myth of Orpheus, the bard and musician, who was transformed into a swan upon his murder and placed in the night sky, next to his instrument Lyra, the lyre. The chart shows the view looking high in the south-east from London at 22:00 BST throughout the week. From the southern hemisphere, the constellation appears much lower in the northern sky.
