#MilkyWay #Astronomy #GalacticJourney #StarGazing #LightPollution #CosmicExploration #NightSky #Galaxies #CelestialBeauty #SpaceScience
What you’re about to watch is an awe-inspiring exploration of the Milky Way, one of the most breathtaking sights in the night sky, often obscured by light pollution. I will take you on a visual journey to rediscover the Milky Way’s splendor and its significance in human history. I’ll start by sharing my personal experience from Colorado during the 2017 total solar eclipse. From a friend’s porch, I captured a stunning 60-second exposure of the Milky Way with a standard DSLR. This cloudy band of light, punctuated by dark patches of dust, spiraling across the sky, is not smoke but our galaxy in all its glory. The Milky Way has been admired by countless generations until light pollution deprived modern viewers of this celestial spectacle. I will show you images capturing the Milky Way’s ethereal beauty. These photos emphasize how our ancestors viewed the same galactic river, whether it be from the deserts of Australia or the coastal regions of Maine. This band of light is not just a visual delight but a connection to human culture that spans thousands of years, known by names like the celestial river and the backbone of the night. Next, I’ll delve into what galaxies really are: colossal assemblies of stars, gas, and dust governed by gravity. For instance, the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, our closest neighbor, each contain hundreds of billions of stars. I’ll explain that galaxies come in a range of sizes, from titanic ones with trillions of stars down to tiny ones with mere millions. As we progress, I’ll incorporate views of the Milky Way across different wavelengths of light, showing you how this variety reveals different aspects of our galaxy. The optical light images showcase a dusty band of stars, while infrared views from the Spitzer Space Telescope highlight warm dust tightly confined to the Milky Way’s plane. Meanwhile, 21-centimeter radio waves from neutral hydrogen gas give insights into cold, diffuse regions. I’ll also include observations in microwave frequencies from the Planck satellite, displaying carbon monoxide and other molecular gases tracing hydrogen throughout our galaxy. Moreover, I’ll cover longer wavelengths, introducing you to synchrotron radiation captured by radio observatories—electrons spiraling in the Milky Way’s magnetic field. Shifting to shorter wavelengths, I’ll present X-ray and gamma-ray observations, pinpointing high-energy sources such as black holes, neutron stars, and rare extragalactic objects like blazars. These diverse observations underscore the complex dynamics and varied phenomena occurring within our galaxy. In addition, I’ll draw parallels with similar spiral galaxies observed from afar, such as the Andromeda Galaxy, M101 (the Pinwheel Galaxy), and others. These references provide a comparative view of what our Milky Way would appear like from the outside, emphasizing their structural and compositional similarities. Images from the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope and the Swift Space Telescope provide a view of Andromeda’s dusty and star-forming regions, unveiling its dynamic star birth areas. To sum up, I’ll take you on a cosmic voyage through images and scientific insights, showing how the Milky Way embodies centuries of human astronomy and remains a focus of modern astrophysical research. This visual and conceptual tour of the Milky Way will help you reimagine our galaxy, encouraging you to seek out dark skies and connect with the starry wonders our ancestors once revered. Thank you for joining me on this exploration of our galactic home.
This is part of my complete intro Astronomy class that I taught at Willam Paterson University and CUNY Hunter.
0:00 Introduction
2:57 The Milky Way, our Galaxy
4:58 What are Galaxies?
5:36 Full-sky views of the Milky Way
6:19 All-sky Milky Way in Optical light
7:57 All-sky Milky Way in H-alpha
10:45 AKARI InfraRed Camera JAXA
11:20 All-Sky Milky Way in Infrared by WISE
12:47 All-sky Milky Way in Hydrogeri emission 2lem
13:43 All-sky Image of Microwave Emission due to CO
15:17 All-sky Image of Microwave Emission (Planck)
16:06 Mapping the Milky Way's Gas and Dust
16:18 All Sky Milky Way in Radio
17:21 X-Ray Survey by RXTE
18:06 All sky Milky Way in X-Ray
18:39 All Sky Milky Way in gamma rays
23:04 M31 on APOD (2009, May 10)
23:11 Spitzer IR Telescope: M31
26:08 NGC 891: A Milky Way Analogue