Under a clear, dark summer sky, there are many objects that can be enjoyed with your unaided eye or binoculars or a small telescope. Putting together a list of the best is, of course, very subjective.

Here is my own "Top Ten" list of sky objects visible during July and August. From your own nights of skywatching you may try compiling your own list and see if we agree on anything.

Summertime is undoubtedly the best time to observe the beautiful Milky Way.

With a good pair of binoculars or a telescope you can now observe millions of sparkling little stars that make up this glowing, irregular belt of luminosity. On early summer evenings it appears to arch from the north-northeast to the south-southeast, with its brightest and most spectacular region running across the Summer Triangle and beyond toward the south-southeast horizon.

There appears to be a great black rift dividing it into two streams, beginning with Cygnus and extending down toward the south. Also in Cygnus is the black void known as the Northern Coal Sack.

This Coal Sack and the Rift are not holes in the Milky Way, but rather are vast clouds of dust "floating" out in interstellar space which present a solid and impenetrable curtain between us and the more distant stars.

Never visible from large cities with their bright lights, smoke and haze, the Milky Way can still be readily viewed from distant suburbs and rural locations.

Before the invention of the telescope, the true nature of the Milky Way Galaxy ("Gala" is Greek for milk) was a mystery. The brightest part of the Milky Way is in the constellation of Sagittarius, near the star El Nasl. In fact, this region is roughly our galaxy's center. It marks the "hub" or central condensation; an area of density and complexity. Even to the unaided eye, the view is one of excitement and beauty.

The Sagittarius Star Cloud, about 30,000 light years distant, seems to be the nucleus, with the Sun and all the outer stars of the galaxy revolving around it at the rate of 155 miles per second. It apparently requires about 200 million of our Earthly years to make one complete revolution, or one "cosmic year," around the center of our galaxy.

When astronomers began to realize that there were other such vast congeries of stars, they called them "island universes," but this was an obvious misnomer; since universe means everything there is, it can hardly have a plural. So we seemed to have settled on galaxies, which is a compromise as a new meaning for an old word.