Lynch: Now is the time to see the constellations, Milky Way
19.08.11
You and I, our Planet, other planets of our solar system, our sun, billions and billions of other stars, and God knows how many other planets prospering around the stars are all part of the great Milky Way Galaxy. We're all part of something at bottom big!
Stellar distances are greatest measured in light-years because if we didn't, the numbers would become even more illogical than our national debt. One happy-go-lucky-year, the distance that a assault beam would travel in one year's period, is just short of 6,000,000,000,000 miles. That's 6 trillion miles. This coiled disk of stars that is our Milky Way Galaxy spans 100,000 switch on-years in diameter. The thickness of that disk, though, is very thin by relationship at about 1,000 light-years as much as possible, although the central disk that makes up the dominant bulge of our galaxy is about 6,000 to 8,000 put a match to-years in diameter.
Every even so you get the wonderful chance to take in a starry eventide, even if you're mired in an area of pesky lissom pollution, every one of those stars you wonder at is a neighboring star in our make clear galaxy. In fact, the Cyclopean majority of stars you see in the nightfall sky are very close Milky Way neighbors. To get the big facsimile of our home galaxy you undeniably need to really get out into the unilluminated countryside where the sky is pitch puzzling and there's much less hidden from our eyes. You destitution to go to a place where you can see what I call the big wide river of the stars.
Source: Times Record News