June’s night skies provide excellent opportunities to discover a slice of the evening sky that is largely unsung, unheralded and usually ignored.

When, for example, was the last time that you heard anyone speaking of Constellation Boötes (pron. boh-OH-teez), the plowman or bear-driver? Culminating on the north/south meridian 9 p.m. June 15, the kite-shaped Boötes is directly overhead 11 p.m. all month.

Locate Boötes’s alpha star, the magnitude 0.15 Arcturus, on the kite’s tail 64 degrees above the south-southwestern horizon, and you’ve hit upon the constellation.

Arcturus is the fourth brightest star in the night sky. Its hue has long been a matter of debate. At first glance, it appears slightly orange, or golden yellow, or maybe reddish yellow. One observer, Nora McGee, described it as the color of “champagne shot through with roses.”

This red giant is 25 times wider than the sun, despite being fractionally (0.011) times more massive. The size difference between the two is comparable to that of a tennis ball to a large beach ball. It’s hurtling toward the sun at 270,000 mph (434,522 km/h), and will make its closest approach in about 4,000 years. Its visible light is 110 times brighter than the sun. Matter continually spews forth in immense coronal loops at 1,200 mi/s (2,000 km/s). It’s a real bear.

In fact, ancient Greeks called the star Arktouros, arktos meaning “bear” and ouros “watcher, guardian.” Early on, they interpreted these circumpolar constellations as a herdsman driving the bears Ursa Major and Ursa Minor with his hunting dog, Canes Venatici, to its east. That story gave way to the more mundane narrative of an innovative plowman with Big Dipper serving as the plow. Ursa Minor culminates at 9 p.m. June 25.

Although Boötes is the 13 th largest constellation, covering 907 square degrees, it contains few astronomical objects. The best one is magnitude 9.2 NGC 5466, a loose globular cluster of stars that are more than 12 billion years old. Keep in mind the universe is 13.777 billion years of age. The 60 or so galaxies herein are small, uninteresting and mostly impossible to resolve in backyard telescopes. It holds no Messier objects.

In fact Boötes, designated by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) with the adorable shorthand “Boo,” is more remarkable for what you don’t see than what you can. The Boötes Void is an area 330 million light-years across that is empty aside the smattering of unassociated field galaxies. This number is significantly less than the 2,000 galaxies that one would normally expect in an area of this size. Although this “supervoid” is not the largest of all cosmic voids, it occupies about two percent of the observable universe.

The boovoid’s center is located at right ascension 14h 50m, declination 46 degrees, roughly between stars Nekkar (beta Boo) in Boötes and Alkaid (eta UMa) in Ursa Major.

Of course, it’s not absolutely empty. It contains enigmatic dark energy; particles that pop in and out of existence due to quantum mechanics; the occasional stray atom, dust particle, light ray and other forms of radiation; and gravitational fields. Still, there’s a good reason the Boötes Void is known as the Great Nothing.

On Boötes’s eastern border, Corona Borealis, culminating at 9 p.m. June 30, is another constellation that’s unlikely to have come up recently in casual conversations. It’s small, ranked 73rd in size out of 88 constellations, and faint with a single star out of seven brighter than magnitude 3.

What Coronal Borealis lacks in intensity makes up for with beauty, drama and legend. The gentle asterism is called the “northern crown” due to its likeness to its namesake. The crown is symmetrical and adorned with such stars as its alpha Gemma, the gem, and the recurrent nova T Coronae Borealis, the Blaze Star.

Like Boötes, Corona Borealis lacks many deep sky objects accessible to backyard scopes. Unlike Boo, the crown is loaded with galaxies, a few of which may be available to larger amateur telescopes. Look for NGC 6086, magnitude 12.7 and NGC 6085, magnitude 14.5, elliptical and spiral galaxies, respectively, visible in the same field of view.

The crown is referenced in myths associated with Theseus, Adriane and the Minotaur. One story tells that the crown was a gift to Adriane by Dionysus after she was abandoned by Theseus. One of the best accounts is in Greek historian Plutarch’s “Life of Theseus.”

Both Libra, the scales of justice, and Lupus, the wolf, culminate at 9 p.m. June 20.

The sun reaches its farthest north in the celestial sphere 8:42 p.m. June 20, the summer solstice and the moment when summer begins.

The moon is full at 1:43 a.m. June 11 and is called the Full Strawberry Moon (Algonquin, Ojibwe, Dakota and Lakota).