Milky Way Photo Galleries
The Milky Way is a hazy band of light that encircles the night sky. In the 1920s that Edwin Hubble conclusively demonstrated that the Milky Way was actually a "spiral nebula" or galaxy (from the Greek galaxies kuklos) resembling the Great Andromeda Galaxy (M31). The major difference is that our own Solar System resides within the Milky Way Galaxy. This gravitationally bound spiral disk of some 100 billion stars has a diameter of 100,000 light years and a thickness of 10,000 light years. The gas, dust and stars in the Milky Way Galaxy are organized in a bar-shaped core surrounded by a disk of curved arms that follow logarithmic spirals like a nautilus shell. These spiral arm structures are easy to see in external galaxies like the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51).
The artificial lights and resulting light pollution of modern cities makes it impossible to see the Milky Way from metropolitan areas. But travel to a remote area with truly dark skies and the Milky Way is revealed as an amazing band of light running across the sky through some of the brightest constellations.
The links below offer several galleries of photographs of the Milky Way taken from the dark skies of Portal, AZ.
