If you look directly south between 10 p.m. and midnight, you will be looking at the densest part of the Milky Way.
Mighty Scorpius the Scorpion stands on its tail directly above the southern horizon. The heart of the Scorpion is the bright red star Antares, the rival of Mars due to its brightness and its red-orange color. Antares is a supergiant star near the end of its life.
To the east of Scorpius is Sagittarius the Archer. Sagittarius looks more like a bright teapot than an archer. Because the Milky Way passes directly through Sagittarius and most of Scorpius, both are filled with star clusters and nebulae that are easily seen through good binoculars and small telescopes.
This is a magnificent area of the sky when viewed on a clear night from a dark location. There is an endless variety of fine telescopic objects for amateur astronomers to observe and photograph and an endless supply of interesting stars and objects for professional astronomers to study.
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The Milky Way is the name for our parent galaxy. In astronomical journals and books, the Milky Way is sometimes called the Galaxy with a capital G. The Milky Way is a very large spiral galaxy with several arms. We are in one of those spiral arms about 25,000 light years from the Galaxy's center, which is in Sagittarius.
The very center is an enormous black hole that is gobbling up dust and gas at a ferocious rate. It is obscured by the dust and gas and is best studied by radio telescopes and by infrared instruments.
Note: Each generation has one or two days that everyone remembers. Sadly, most commemorate terrible events such as 9/11 or the attack on Pearl Harbor.
But one of the happiest events took place on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The mission represented the fulfillment of thousands of years of human wonder and endeavor.