The Milky Way.  Our own Galaxy Home

The Milky Way is a faint band of light which crosses the sky and which has probably never been seen by most people in the developped world.  It must have been a familiar sight before the invention of the elecric light and is now known to be caused by the fact that we live in a great spiral galaxy similar to M51 (or possibly M109 as it is believed to be a barred spiral), or edge on like NGC4565.  We live more or less in the plane of the galaxy, some two-thirds of the way from the centre, so the Milky Way is the result of looking in the plane of the galaxy with its miriad of stars.  In the picture below we are looking almost along the spiral arm on the edge of which we live, so the density of stars is particularly high.  Also visible is a dark band, know as the Cygnus Rift, which is caused by obscuring dust which blocks the light from the more-distant stars.  The name Milky Way is now given to this galaxy.

This picture is based on the same picture that I used for my page on the constellation of Cygnus, but I have processed it in a way to bring out the faint glow of the Milky Way.

The picture was taken with my Canon 1000D DSLR with a focal length of 18 mm, an exposure of 20 seconds at f/3.5, and ISO 1600.  Firstly I enhanced the picture by increasing the gamma to 1.5, and the contrast by 20% in PhotoImpact.  The whole picture had a red-brown glow caused by the light pollution here (I live only a few miles west of an industrial town with a fully-lit motorway in between), so I used the eyedropper tool to sample an area I believed should be black and then used the colour-balance tool to set this colour to black.  (I assume that in Photoshop this would be done by adjusting the levels.)  I then reduced the size from the original 3888×2592 pixels to a size more suited to my web page.  This process weakens the image, so I increased the gamma again by 1.5 to get the final picture.  If you move your mouse over the image, you will see the original picture reduced to size.








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