Happy springtime! Winter, or at least the astronomical winter of 2022-23, is history! The vernal equinox took place last Monday. From now until late June, the sun will make longer and higher arcs from east to west across the sky as it crosses into the northern half of the sky for the first time since last September. Summer won't be long!

Even though it's spring, Orion and the rest of the winter constellations still shine brightly in the Butler southwestern sky. The big guy himself has three bright stars in a row that make up the hermit hunter's belt.

Orion's brightest star is Rigel, marking Orion's left knee, and Betelgeuse at the other corner marks Orion's armpit. Betelgeuse is an Arabic name that roughly translates in English to "armpit of the great one." Betelgeuse is a very significant star astronomically. It's a super red giant star that sometimes bulges out to nearly a billion miles in diameter.

On the southern and western side of Orion's gang of winter shiners are his hunting dogs, the constellations Canis Major and Canis Minor.

Canis Major kind of looks like a dog standing on his hind legs, with the very bright Sirius marking the big dog's snout.

Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky. It's so brilliant because it's relatively close to Earth, at least as far as stars go. Sirius is a little over eight and a half light-years or about fifty trillion miles away. Believe it or not, that is chump change when it comes to stellar distances.

Canis Minor, Orion's little dog, is a joke of a constellation. It's two stars next to each other, a bright one and a dim one. The bright one is Procyon, 11.5 light-years away, the next brightest star you see to the upper left of Sirius. The dimmer star to the upper right of Procyon is Gomeisa. And that is Canis Minor. At my astronomy programs and parties, I refer to it as Orion's little wiener dog!

Orion and the winter dogs are not long for our evening sky because one big kitty cat is chasing them. The best constellation of the spring skies, Leo the Lion, is on the prowl, climbing higher and higher in the southeast evening in pursuit of the mighty hunter and the pooches of winter.

Leo is one of the few constellations that resembles what it should be. The right side looks just like a backward question mark, and it's not hard to imagine that as the profile of the chest and head of a mighty lion.

To the lower left of the backward question mark are three stars that form a distinct triangle that allegedly outlines the tail and hind quarters of the celestial lion.

According to Greek mythology, Leo was the king of all beasts. Not only is Leo a behemoth lion, but his hide is so tough that not even the sharpest sword at full thrust could pierce it! As tough of a hunter as Orion was, along with his tenacious dogs (at least Canis Major), they were no match for this big kitty.

Rather than fight this fierce feline, Orion and his posse escape certain death by heading out of the spring evening skies, running steadily from night to night toward the western horizon. By mid-May, the great winter hunter and his doggies are entirely gone from the night sky.

This annual chase is reenacted every spring, and we can thank the Earth's orbit around the sun for the show. As our home planet circles the sun, the nighttime side of the Earth faces different directions in space, and we on Earth watch the stars shift westward from night to night. That's why we have different sets of constellations from season to season.

Celestial Happening this week: On Wednesday and Thursday this week, you can use the very bright planet Venus in the early evening western sky to locate the very distant planet Uranus.

You can't miss Venus. It's by far the brightest starlike object in the early evening. On Wednesday, Uranus will be just 1.5 degrees to the upper left of Venus, and on Thursday evening, Uranus will be even closer, just 1.2 degrees to the lower left of the planet named after the Roman goddess of love.

You'll need a small telescope to spot Uranus. It'll appear as a tiny blueish-green dot, just under 1.9 billion miles away. The width of your finger held at arm's length equals about one degree.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of "Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations," published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.