Under the Milky Way Tonight
I took the title from an 80's song I love by The Church - Under the Milky Way.
This is the night sky over South Africa - much different from the light polluted areas that I'm from in Southern California.
While on safari at Ngala Game Reserve we would stop for a cocktail and wine break at each sunset then drive back in the dark. When we reached a clearing we would stop and star gaze. And quite literally we star gazed! With no light pollution we could see millions if not billions of stars. The Milky Way was obviously visible - here you can see it stretching diagonally across the sky from the bottom left to the top right of the image.
The Milky Way is the galaxy that we exist in. It appears like a streak across the sky because it is disc like in shape and we are looking at it from within the disc. It rotates about once every 15-50 million years. The galaxy as a whole is moving at a velocity of about 350 miles per second.
Another interesting insight is that the Southern Hemisphere sky is quite different from what I'm used to seeing too. Obviously we were looking at different stars but it was really quite odd. For instance Orion was upside down. And of course the was no North Star. There was, however, the Southern Cross - which is basically the polar opposite of the North Star.
Maybe the most interesting part of this image though is about half way up on the right side of the sky. See that small cloud-like smudge? That is the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC for short. It is another galaxy out side of ours. It is technically referred to as a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and it is about 160,000 light years away. It is pretty mind blowing to see another galaxy in plain sight.
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