Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site utastro.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!ut-sally!utastro!charles From: charles@utastro.UUCP (Charles Sandel) Newsgroups: net.astro Subject: StarDate: August 18 Message-ID: <414@utastro.UUCP> Date: Mon, 20-Aug-84 11:42:09 EDT Article-I.D.: utastro.414 Posted: Mon Aug 20 11:42:09 1984 Date-Received: Wed, 22-Aug-84 02:47:02 EDT Distribution: net Organization: UTexas Astronomy Dept., Austin, Texas Lines: 44 It's worth a trip to the country to see the summer Milky Way. More about it -- right after this. August 18: The Milky Way If you go into the country this month, plan for a moonless night when the air is clear and still. Look overhead -- and there you'll see a hazy starlit band arcing across the sky -- the glittering arc of the summer Milky Way. If you have binoculars, you can prove to yourself that the haze is really stars -- countless stars blurred together over colossal interstellar distances. These stars only appear close together because they're very far from Earth. When we look at the Milky Way, we're looking into the plane of our own galaxy. We see the Milky Way as a starlit trail spun across the sky -- but it's really a huge star-island with a compact center and winding spiral arms. The Milky Way is a so-called spiral galaxy -- one of billions in the universe. In summer, our night sky is turned so that we face toward the center of our own galaxy. The galactic center lies due south in August, in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. In a dark sky, you can see that the starlit trail widens in the south into a broad boulevard of stars. It's tempting to imagine that these very stars reside in the galaxy's core. But they don't. The actual center lies some 30 thousand light-years from us and is wholly obscured by impenetrable clouds of gas and dust. When we look southward in the August sky, we're really seeing stars in the next spiral arm inward from ours, called the Sagittarius Arm. Script by Deborah Byrd. (c) Copyright 1983, 1984 McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin -- *>> Charles Sandel <<* uucp: {ut-sally, ut-ngp, noao, charm}!utastro!charles arpa: charles@utastro.UTEXAS.ARPA charles@ut-sally.UTEXAS.ARPA at&t: (512) 471-4461 x439