Find the brightest star nearly overhead on a July night and you have found the corner of a triangle you will never lose again. Three stars of nearly equal brightness stand almost at the top of the sky through the warm months: Vega, Deneb, and Altair. They are borrowed from three separate constellations, Lyra and Cygnus and Aquila, and joined into a pattern that is not an official constellation at all, only a shape the eye assembles. From this high desert, where the dry air carries almost no haze, they ride close enough to straight up that the honest advice is to lie down and look.
They look like siblings. Three white points of matched brightness, evenly serious, as if they belonged to one family at one distance. They do not. The gaps behind them are so unequal that the tidy triangle is a trick of the line of sight, three stars that happen to fall along the same patch of sky from very different depths.
Two of them are close, as stars go. Altair is one of the nearer bright stars to the sun, about seventeen light-years off, with a fainter star set close on either side of it. Vega is a little farther, around twenty-five light-years, blue-white and the brightest of the three. Vega carries a second surprise: it was once the North Star, and will be again. Earth's axis wobbles in a slow circle that takes roughly 25,800 years to close, and that wobble last pointed near Vega around 12,000 BCE and will swing back to it about 13,700 CE. The pole we steer by is not a fixed address.
The third star is the reason the triangle is worth this much attention. Deneb, marking the tail of Cygnus, looks no dimmer than its neighbors, yet it sits somewhere out around fifteen hundred light-years away, and the distance is too great to measure cleanly; the real figure runs well past that. For a star that far to hold its own beside two stars in our own backyard, it has to be pouring out something on the order of a hundred thousand times the light of the sun. The other two are near lamps. Deneb is a bonfire seen across a valley.
One more thing hangs in the triangle, and it shows only from ground like this. The Milky Way runs straight through it. Under a city sky you will never find it; under the dark, dry sky over this bajada in August, after midnight, the band is not a faint smudge but a real current of light, pouring down through the triangle and off toward the southern horizon, with a dark lane splitting it where dust hides the stars behind.
Lie back on a dark August night and find the three. The faint band pouring between them is our own galaxy, seen edge-on.