These May nights provide the skywatcher impressive views of galactic clusters unimpeded by the Milky Way, the chance to study exoplanets and the opportunity to refresh one’s perspectives.

Constellation Virgo, the maiden or furrow, is highest for the year on the north/south meridian — culminates — 9 p.m. May 25.

Look due south to find magnitude 1.0 alpha star Spica, “ear of wheat,” 38 degrees above the southern horizon. Spica is accompanied by “companion” magnitude 3.6 beta star Zavijava, “the angle” in Arabic. Their association is by chance only along the line of sight: Spica is 260 light years away whereas Zavijava closer at 36 light years.

Virgo’s other main stars include magnitude 2.8 Porrima, a multiple star system named for a Roman goddess of prophecy; magnitude 2.6 Vindemiatrix, Latin for “grape gatherer”; magnitude 3.9 Zaniah, another Arabic word for “the angle”; and Syrma, the magnitude 4.1 “train of dress.”

Of the asterism’s 15 main stars, only three are brighter than magnitude 3.0. But don’t let the paucity of dazzlers discourage you. Covering 1294 square degrees, Virgo is the second largest constellation after Hydra, and there’s plenty going on here. Many of the stars serve as touchstones to help reveal its deeper mysteries.

Exoplanets are a common theme in Virgo, with 35 verified orbiting 29 stars. Detecting an exoplanet requires robotic telescopes and studies that largely involve calculating radial velocity (watching for the star to wobble) and transits (looking for a shadow to cross a star).

Remarkably, amateur astronomers, referred to as citizen scientists in this context, can assist professional astronomers in their hunt and confirmation of exoplanets in a number of ways, including by using their own equipment or through remotely operated robotic telescopes. In addition to researching exoplanets, you can take your own pictures and investigate other phenomena like variable stars and meteors. Visit projectpanoptes.org/.

With the naked eye, look high to Virgo’s northern border near Constellation Coma Berenices to find 70 Virginis at magnitude 4.97. This 7.9 billion year old binary has an exoplanet with a mass of 7.4 times that of Jupiter. Magnitude 4.65 Chi Virginis has an exoplanet 11 times the mass of Jupiter. Faint 61 Virginis at magnitude 4.74 has three planets with minimum masses between five and 25 times that of Earth.

Virgo’s broad expanse embraces some of the densest concentrations of galaxies in the sky. The Virgo Cluster, whose center is about 53 light year distant, is a collection of between 1,300 and 2,000 galaxies, many of which are visible in 6-inch plus telescopes. Ranging in size and therefore in brightness, some are faint dwarfs, nondescript smudges in the eyepiece. Others, however, are prominent, glorious and spellbinding.

Around 10 p.m. any night, find Vindemiatrix nearly 60 degrees above the south-southwestern horizon, and then scan to half the distance to Denebola in Leo. Here the skywatcher will find galaxies galore like Messier object 49, M59, M60, M84, M87 and NGC 5846, all uncommon elliptical galaxies so named for their round-to-oval shapes. More common spiral galaxies (think Milky Way) also abound, including M58, M61, M90 and M104, the famed Sombrero Galaxy.

Astronomers realized about 100 years ago that the Virgo Cluster and the Local Group, of which the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are members, compose the Virgo Supercluster. About 100 galaxy groups (each group numbers about 50 galaxies) are concentrated in an area about 110 light years in diameter. This supercluster is one of approximately 10 million superclusters in the visible universe.

Superclusters form walls of long, threadlike assemblages called galaxy filaments. These webs — the largest structures in the known universe — form boundaries between cosmic voids, unimaginably vast empty spaces populated by few to zero galaxies.

The Virgo Supercluster is an appendage of the Laniakea Supercluster, an unfathomably immense filamentous web of 100,000 galaxies.

Abell 1689, discovered in Virgo in 2008, is the biggest and most massive galaxy cluster known with 160,000 members, the largest population yet found, but you need Hubble Space Telescope’s long exposure imaging to observe it. The cluster is 2.3 billion light years away, and not associated with the local filaments.

As impressive as Virgo is in fact, so too it, or rather she, is in historical mythology.

One of only three female constellations out of 88 recognized by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), and the solitary one in the zodiac, Virgo, or rather the furrow, loomed large before a time of anyone’s recall.

The constellation was already established as the capable fertility goddess Ishtar by the time the Sumerians invented the first writing — cuneiform — as told in the “Epic of Gilgamesh” around 3200 BCE. Ishtar, whose cult survived for thousands of years, was a goddess of many things, including war, love, fertility, political power, divine law, sensuality, procreation but certainly not of virginity.

To the ancient Greeks, the constellation represented Demeter, the goddess of harvest, and was associated with flowers, fruit, grain, crops, marriage and fertility, but never chastity.

For something to bear fruit, fertilization needs to happen first. The soil must be tilled, the furrow plowed, seeds must be planted, flowers pollinated, etc. before reaping the harvest. The Ancients knew this implicitly.

Although “Virgo” is of Latin derivation, the identification of the constellation with virginity came thousands of years later during the medieval period when the constellation was at times associated with the Virgin Mary of the Christian tradition. This interpretation would be an anathema to the ancient priests and priestesses of the faith.

Midpoint of spring is 8:43 p.m. May 5. The moon is full at 10:55 a.m. May 12 and is called the Full Flower (Algonquin/Ojibwe) or Egg Laying (Cree) Moon.