Four out of the five brightest stars we can see are now readily visible in the early evening celestial dome. Of course, the sun is our brightest and closest star. Once the sun has finally set this time of year, the brightest star is Arcturus, lighting up the southern sky, and next in line is Vega, showing off its brilliance in the high eastern sky.

Capella is the fifth-brightest star we can see from our planet. Look for it as soon as you can in the low northwestern sky, poking out of the evening twilight. Don’t wait too long to look for Capella, though, because it slips below the horizon shortly after 11 p.m. Even though it’s only fifth place in stellar brightness, Capella’s claim to fame is that it’s the brightest nighttime star that we see most often in our northern hemisphere.

Capella can make that claim because it’s the nearest, brightest star to Polaris, the North Star. Polaris marks the position of the north celestial pole. Every celestial object we see in the sky, day or night, whether it’s the sun, the moon, planets or stars, all appear to rotate around the North Star Polaris once every 24 hours. Polaris is the “lynchpin” (sorry) of the sky because it shines directly above the Earth’s terrestrial North Pole.

(Mike Lynch)

If we lived at the North Pole, the North Star would be directly overhead, and everything in the celestial dome would pivot around the overhead North Star every 24 hours. Around here, we live about halfway between the North Pole and the Earth’s equator, so in our sky, Polaris is permanently fixed about halfway between the northern horizon and the overhead zenith.

Stars close to Polaris in the sky, like those that make up the Big and Little Dippers and the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia, are so close to the north celestial pole that they’re always above the horizon, moving in a tight circle around the North Star. They are called circumpolar stars, and we see them night after night.

Capella is not quite close enough to Polaris to be considered a circumpolar star, but it’s close. Because of its northward position, Capella can be seen in our evening skies from late August to mid-June. Throughout the year it never goes an entire night without making at least a brief appearance.

Astronomically, Capella is around 42 light-years away, with just one light-year equaling nearly 6 trillion miles. While it looks like one giant star, it’s actually made up of four stars, two binary systems of stars, all revolving around each other. In each of the binary pairs, one of the stars is a huge giant, way larger and more massive than our sun, and the smaller star is considered a red dwarf, way smaller than our sun.

According to Greek mythology, Capella is known as the “goat star.” That’s because it’s the brightest star in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer. The constellation Auriga basically resembles a lopsided pentagon that’s supposed to be a retired chariot driver turned goat farmer, with a mama goat on his shoulder and baby goats in the crook of his elbow. How you get all of that out of a lopsided pentagon is beyond me. There must have been quite a party when that constellation was conjured up. Capella is supposed to mark the position where the mama goat is sitting on the chariot driver’s shoulder, and that’s why it’s known as the goat star.

Unfortunately, all we can see right now of the constellation Auriga in the early evening is Capella. By early August, though, the lopsided pentagon will be available for very early morning viewing in the pre-twilight northeast sky. Until then, all we have is Capella, or what I like to call the “Old Faithful” of nighttime stars.

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. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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KYIV, Ukraine — As we sped along the highway from Odesa to Kyiv last Sunday, one of the Ukrainian passengers in the car suddenly let out a shout. The car swerved into a roadside gas station where people were glued to their cell phones.

The news had just broken online about Ukraine’s stunning drone assault on four Russian air bases — two of them thousands of miles inside Russia — which destroyed or damaged 40 strategic bombers used to carry cruise and ballistic missile attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure, possibly sidelining one-third of Russia’s fleet.

Snarky memes started pouring onto the messaging app Telegram, ridiculing Vladimir Putin and his hapless air defense system. “The Russian army is now the second best in Europe,” crowed one popular post. Another aimed its dart at President Donald Trump, proclaiming, “You said we had no cards, but we had the wild card.”

This daring act of sabotage, 18 months in the planning, amounts to far more than a desperately needed morale boost for Ukrainians following Trump’s effective defection to Putin’s side.

Operation Spiderweb not only illustrated the brilliance of Ukraine’s technological skills and the flaws of the Russian military, but it put the lie to Trump’s claim that Russia is the war’s inevitable winner (no wonder the president, as of Tuesday, had barely mentioned this stunning attack, and claimed he knew nothing beforehand).

The daring maneuver also demonstrates to the world how the use of drones and unmanned systems — with Ukraine now the global leader through its innovation and battlefield use — have become the new face of modern war.

A year ago, on my last visit to Ukraine, there was a shortage of artillery shells on the eastern front line after the GOP-led U.S. Congress cut military aid for six months. I watched determined soldiers fashion a few homemade shells using 3D printers and scrap metal filled with salvaged and melted explosive material pried from tank mines.

Such units turned, in desperation, to inexpensive first-person view (FPV) drones for surveillance and attack.

Starting with common, cheap Chinese Mavic drones, of the kind that Americans use for weddings and on vacation, frontline units ordered drones or parts on Amazon, or were gifted them by friends, family, and civilian volunteer organizations.

One year later, 80% of frontline “kills” of Russian soldiers and material come from drones carrying varying amounts of explosives and traveling increasingly long distances.

However, Ukrainians remain woefully short of air defenses that can repel cruise and ballistic missiles, especially given the failure of the U.S. and Europe to deliver the U.S. Patriot systems and interceptors that had been promised.

Ukraine begged former President Joe Biden and German leaders to no avail to provide long-range missiles that could hit distant Russian aerodromes and eliminate strategic bombers at the source.

Exploiting this vulnerability, Putin has increased the number of strategic missiles aimed at civilian infrastructure, especially energy systems.

That is what makes Operation Spiderweb such a breathtaking combination of chutzpah and expertise.

Using 117 FPV drones, costing around $2,000 each, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) claims to have wiped out $7 billion worth of strategic aircraft — a stunning cost-to-benefit ratio. Moreover, Russia no longer has the technology to make such planes, so they can’t be replaced.

“Not everything can be revealed, but these are Ukrainian actions that will undoubtedly be in history books,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted.

Russian morale also took a hit, as military bloggers bemoaned the careless lack of security and underestimation of Ukrainian secret services.

Although all details are not yet confirmed, the SBU said the drones were smuggled into Russia, then hidden in the roofs of model vacation cabins, which were trucked on platforms to locations near the air bases by unwitting Russian drivers.

Then the roofs of the vacation homes retracted simultaneously by the four major air bases, releasing drones programmed to hit the fuel tanks of the planes, ensuring they would explode. The batteries of the drones were kept charged by putting solar panels on the roofs of the cabins, just above the hidden drones.

This sabotage attack can’t be considered a total game changer since the drones never could have traveled thousands of miles inside Russia without the brilliant truck scheme.

However, as I was told by Sergii Kuzan, head of the Ukrainian Center for Security and Cooperation, Operation Spiderweb does reflect a “revolution in warfare because drones can replace the function of every type of equipment we now use for war, on sea, air and land.” And, they can be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of the weapon and manpower they can destroy.

Moreover, Operation Spiderweb, conducted the day before the second round of Trump-driven “peace talks” between Russian and Ukrainian teams, exposed the harsh truth about trying to woo Moscow toward peace by offering concession after concession up front.

Russia has not budged one inch from its demand for total capitulation and subservience from Kyiv, and has only increased its missile barrage on Ukrainian cities. Yet Trump refuses to carry out his threat to impose new sanctions if Putin rejects a ceasefire.

Ukraine demonstrated clearly on Sunday that it won’t play the Kremlin’s cynical game. It will continue to show up for the useless talks to appease Trump, but it will pressure Moscow though Trump does not.

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The day after Spiderweb, the SBU did a follow-up, conducting a third explosive hit on Putin’s favorite Kerch Bridge, which links Crimea to the Russian mainland, hitting underwater supports.

These attacks landed severe psychological blows to Russia that Putin won’t be able to shield the public from. And as I saw firsthand, Operation Spiderweb will bolster the will of hard-pressed Ukrainians to continue their existential fight.

Maria Savianenko, one of the Ukrainians traveling with me on Sunday, gave voice to those feelings: “Drones have changed the war, changed everything. A country without ships drove out the Russian fleet with drones, and without planes, we destroyed their planes. We can’t stop now because it is the only chance in our history to beat the Russians back.”

When she attended the memorial service Wednesday for a friend killed in direct combat on the front, she said that she would consider that every plane destroyed by Operation Spiderweb was “done in his name.”

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for The Philadelphia Inquirer, P.O. Box 8263, Philadelphia, Pa. 19101. Her email address is trubin@phillynews.com.

I’ve been a faculty member at the University of Chicago for 27 years; for 12 of them, I was married to the university’s late president, Robert J. Zimmer. Bob was well known for his endorsement of the “Chicago Principles” addressing academic free speech, which were formulated by a faculty committee he appointed in 2014.

Now, in 2025, at a time when opposing ideological forces threaten to rip higher education apart altogether, it’s clearer than ever we need to observe these principles if we are to maintain our universities as places for inquiry and learning rather than the nurturing of ideologies.

First of all, let’s be clear. Academic free speech and public free speech are not the same, and the Chicago Principles refer to the former, repeating a view of speech on campus with roots deep in the university’s history. “There is not an institution of learning in the country in which freedom of teaching is more absolutely untrammeled than in the University of Chicago,” remarked university President William Rainey Harper in 1902.

Thirty years later, at a time of tension over a communist speaker on campus, President Robert M. Hutchins wrote that students “should have freedom to discuss any problem that presents itself.”

Today, when being either for or against the position of our national government comes with undue risk and when free speech seems to many to be an insoluble problem, these principles — what they allow and what they do not — offer us simple guidelines as the American university faces two crises, both political in nature.

The first crisis is one of free speech — and free thought — under attack.

Faculty across the country face constraints on the ability to express a liberal opinion on any controversial matter, especially if related to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) or other “woke” topics.

One of my friends from another university worries that despite her U.S. passport (she’s originally Japanese) the ICE men will kidnap her off the street because her work is in gender, disability and health. She doesn’t expect her administration to step in if she’s detained — too many college administrations are primarily worried about losing additional government funding.

My friend is not being paranoid, and that’s pretty terrifying in a country known for tolerance and freedom. Professors and students have been shut down or removed (or have fled the U.S.) for their views. Just think of Rümeysa Öztürk, whose great crime appears to have been co-authoring a pro-Palestinian op-ed for her school newspaper while on a valid F-1 visa.

Never mind the Chicago Principles, ICE’s overreach in her case violates the First Amendment: The government shall not interfere with freedom of expression. Öztürk was not disruptive or violent. She simply published a point of view. Are we willing to let go of this democratic cornerstone that enables public discourse and government accountability? Don’t we want to push back even a little?

The second crisis is arguably one of pushing free speech too far.

Some students and faculty on campuses around the country seem to be confusing vandalism and disruption with the function of learning.

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Is using a bullhorn an example of academic free speech? If you thereby chill the main function of a university, offering an education, by disrupting classes and students, the Chicago Principles would say it’s not. Nor is taking over a campus quad, vandalizing university property, throwing paint or harassing people you disagree with.

Free speech on campus is enabled by certain limits of time, place and manner that keep it manageable for all. The university “may restrict expression that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment … or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the university.” Without such limits a university will have difficulty following its calling.

If the future of the university itself is now at stake, as so many seem to agree, it would be a good time to reinstate our commitment to these principles. University presidents need not have to decide whether or not to call in the police if tent cities spring up on campus and administrative buildings are taken over. It should never get to that stage in the first place.

Shadi Bartsch is a professor in humanities at the University of Chicago and former director of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. She wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

(Courtesy of HarperCollins)

JILLIAN CANTOR: Discusses her book “Beautiful Little Fools,” stories of the women of “The Great Gatsby” in the years leading up to events portrayed in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, part of Friends of the St. Paul Public Library’s yearlong celebration of the 100th anniversary of “Gatsby.” Free. 6:15 p.m. Tuesday, Riverview Public Library, 1 E. George St., St. Paul.

ARON OLSON: Presents “Crumbling Misplacements,” which celebrates neurodivergent literature, in conversation with Xander Gershberg. 7 p.m. Wednesday, Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.

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