Perfect Night in the Milky Way

Magic 8/5/2008, 2:31 am

LOL....funny name for our Galaxy when you type it out

Clear sky and warm at 2am.....can't beat it.

No Moon to mess up the view.

Watching Saturn move to the western sky and behind the ridge.

Several meteors zip across the sky in different places and you get lucky sometimes and
just happen to look right at one.

The rest of the week should be plenty warm here so I will have to lay out and get a good
view of the north and western sky from horizon to straight up since that is always the dark side of our planet.

The Milky Way seems to be in-line with my house as I look right up at the long strip of distant stars that looks like.......dim stripe of milk circling the sky above me.

An illusion sort of.

Since we are in this Milky Way galaxy which is about 90,000 light years in diameter.

Which means we will never have any human fly out to any other galaxy.

The giant spiral galaxy that is far from the next one in a Universe with tens of millions more galaxy's much bigger
than ours with trillions of stars and planets we will never do much more than look at with our space telescopes.

And to top the night off I netted two lil trouts out of the creek in the dark with the flashlight and put em in the pond.........sort of like a fish traveling across his Universe

......goodnight Earthlings.......

Perfect Night in the Milky Way Milkyway

Magic 8/5/2008, 2:42 am

And these are the galaxy's around ours that are 55 million to 140 million light years away from our galaxy.

Perfect Night in the Milky Way Galaxies

Guest 8/5/2008, 4:52 am

"Ground control to Major Tom, er... Major Magic..."

Agent 99 8/5/2008, 7:38 am

August 12: The Perseids

The Perseid shower is a popular display because it offers plenty of meteors (up to 60 an hour) under a summer sky. Showtime begins after 1:30 a.m. with the departure of the 10-day-old Moon. The radiant is near the Double Cluster in Perseus.

You should start to see some of these meteors now. That's probably what you were seeing the other night. My 10 year old daughter and I layed out in the yard and watched them last year. Probably avereaged 20 an hour. Not too bad. Also watched a couple satellites pass by as well.

I remember in one of my astronomy classes that the professor said that if you took one square inch out of the sky, you would have millions of stars within that one inch square. Hard to believe how vast the universe really is.

WE ARE NOT ALONE!!!!!!!!!!!!