It's a fact: thumb through most astronomy books or skywatching guides and you'll find all the accolades going to the most brilliant and splashy star patterns such as Orion, the Hunter, Scorpius, the Scorpion or (for southern observers), the region around Crux, the Southern Cross.

In contrast, the small, faint star patterns usually get short shrift.

Yet there's one pattern that I always look for when I have the chance, partly because it serves as an excellent gauge for determining the quality of the night sky and also because it serves as a "pointer" to one of the summer's best deep-sky objects.

On most star charts Vulpecula, the Little Fox seems to be nothing more than a formless splattering of dim stars. But the late Dr. Hugh Rice, who more than half a century ago used to work at New York's Hayden Planetarium, showed part of this group on his star maps as something resembling a cowboy boot. The boot even boasted a spur that many cowboys wear.

Involving mostly faint stars, Rice's pattern ironically doesn't include this constellation's brightest, Alpha Vulpeculae. The average visual magnitude of the twelve stars that compose the boot is 5.0, so when all the stars in this celestial shoe are visible with the unaided eye, the sky is transparent and your observing conditions excellent.

Sighted in wide-field binoculars or a telescope's viewfinder, Rice's pattern helps us locate the beautiful Dumbbell Nebula (M27). Picked up with very low power as a glowing bubble encompassing two hazy patches of light; it assumes a dumbbell appearance in larger telescopes. The name "Dumbbell" was, in fact, derived from the description by Reverend T.W. Webb (1807-1885) of "two hazy masses in contact."

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