Take a tour of our Milky Way
Over the next few weeks our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is at its very best viewing to the naked eyes in the evening skies for the entire year. Around 9 p.m., the three brightest stars visible this time of the year shine nearly overhead and point the way to the beauty of this grand collection of stars.
The stellar trio forms what is known as the Summer Triangle. Each corner’s bright star represents a starting point to an individual constellation. While not a constellation itself, the Summer Triangle offers a great three-forone-deal to backyard stargazers. Riding overhead and leading the triangle is Vega, part of the constellation Lyra, the harp. The other points of the triangle are Deneb, the tail of Cygnus the swan, and Altair, the eye of Aquila the eagle.
And if you look carefully you will notice that the brightest section of the Milky Way band also happens to run right through this region of the night sky. From Montreal suburbs, the Milky Way will be a challenge to see, but with binoculars — it is quite an impressive sight to sit back and scan.
However, even a half-hour drive from the city — out to Hudson, for instance — the Milky Way looks like a pearly luminescent ribbon stretching across the night sky. At first sight it’s easily mistaken for an overhead bank of faint clouds. Gaze at it with binoculars, however, and you will notice countless number of stars.
The Milky Way is a collection of stars, clouds of gas and dust we call a galaxy. Our sun and its family of planets live inside this vast spinning pinwheel shaped island of stars. Home to about 100 billion suns, this Frisbee-shaped disk stretches some 100,000 light years across and is about 1000 light years thick. Yet, the Milky Way is only one of at least 100 billion other galaxies that are thought to inhabit the universe.
The hazy band we see in our sky is one of our galaxy’s spiral arms spread out in front of us — filled with countless of millions of stars. Our sun sits about two-thirds of the way out from the downtown central core of the galaxy, at about 26,000 light years distant.
Lifting silently across the sky, the Milky Way glows from the north horizon to south horizon throughout late summer. It crosses many constellations from Cassiopeia low in the north, through Cygnus overhead and straight down to Sagittarius in the south. And it is in this constellation where you’ll find the heart of our galaxy. While most of the central hub of this giant pinwheel is obstructed by gas and dust you will notice there is a definite bulging radiance in that direction of the sky.