Climb up to 5000 meters (16,500 feet) above sea level, near Cerro Chajnantor in the northern Chilean Andes, and your night sky could encompass this cosmic vista. Recorded from that high and dry locale, the spectacular fish-eye image features the myriad stars and sprawling dust clouds of our Milky Way Galaxy. The [...]]]>

Climb up to 5000 meters (16,500 feet) above sea level, near Cerro Chajnantor in the northern Chilean Andes, and your night sky could encompass this cosmic vista. Recorded from that high and dry locale, the spectacular fish-eye image features the myriad stars and sprawling dust clouds of our Milky Way Galaxy. The direction toward the center of the Galaxy is near the zenith and center of the picture, but the Galactic Center itself is hidden from view, located far behind the obscuring dust. Brilliant Jupiter rules this scene just above the Milky Way’s central bulge with the noticeably fainter, yellowish, giant star Antares to its right. Small and faint, near the right edge of the picture is one of the Milky Way’s many satellite galaxies, the Small Magellanic Cloud.
APOD: 2008 January 4 – The Milky Way at 5000 Meters

Most bright stars in our Milky Way Galaxy reside in a disk. Since our Sun also resides in this disk, these stars appear to us as a diffuse band that circles the sky. The above panorama of a northern band of the Milky Way’s disk covers 90 degrees and is a digitally [...]]]>

Most bright stars in our Milky Way Galaxy reside in a disk. Since our Sun also resides in this disk, these stars appear to us as a diffuse band that circles the sky. The above panorama of a northern band of the Milky Way’s disk covers 90 degrees and is a digitally created mosaic of several independent exposures. Scrolling right will display the rest of this spectacular picture. Visible are many bright stars, dark dust lanes, red emission nebulae, blue reflection nebulae, and clusters of stars. In addition to all this matter that we can see, astronomers suspect there exists even more dark matter that we cannot see.
APOD: 2007 September 30 – A Milky Way Band

The Mayan calendar doesn’t end in 2012; rather, a new cycle begins then, rather like an odometer reaching 100,000 miles. It does not appear that the solar cycle coming up will be a particularly active one, and it looks like it will peak in 2013 rather than 2012. The solar system will [...]]]>

The Mayan calendar doesn’t end in 2012; rather, a new cycle begins then, rather like an odometer reaching 100,000 miles. It does not appear that the solar cycle coming up will be a particularly active one, and it looks like it will peak in 2013 rather than 2012. The solar system will not be moving through the plane of the Milky Way for a few million years. So don’t waste a lot of worry on 2012!
South Jersey Skies: Its the end of the world again! – Gloucester County Voices – NJ.com