If I’m facing South, in the Northern Hemisphere, and look up, in what direction does the Milky Way appear?
I think it’s SE to NW, but would like to confirm.
It depends on the time of year and of the night.
It’s September where I am.
There is a time of year when the Milky Way is on the horizon in every direction! I’ll have to check for when that is, but when you consider that the Milky Way (our galaxy) is essentially flat it makes sense that there has to be a time when we are “in the plane” of the galaxy and can see it all around us. It is densest, of course, near its center (in the direction of Sagittarius and Scorpio) and least dense out toward the edge of the arm we are in.
Star maps show this sort of thing well, and the celestial globe I have even better.
So tonight in the USA Midwest, facing South. What direction does it run?
So install Stellarium, put in your site and and find out. But basically it runs south to north arcing to the east
I thought that was it. It’s faint, but visible from my yard. It’s faint enough, without waiting for dark adaption, that you can’t really be sure it’s there.
Thanks.
Some links that may help:
Sorry for the hijack, but here is my obligatory Milky Way photo.
I’ve had one of these planisphere things since I was a child. You line up the day of the year (outside ring) with the time of day (inside ring) and it shows you what the sky looks like. It really gives one a feel for how the Earth moves and how the night sky changes from hour to hour and day to day. In this image, you can see the Milky Way.
I thought the majority of the milkyway was below the horizon from the northern hemisphere.
Colour me confused. I thought the galaxy we’re in is called the Milky Way, so it’s everywhere you turn.
Is there some factor I’m overlooking? The horizontal stripe where the majority of the stars are, perhaps? Even that doesn’t make the question any clearer for me.
We live just outside of an arm of a spiral galaxy, towards the edge. So while we’re surrounded by the milky way, it’s a lot more visible when you look towards the plane of the galaxy, rather than ‘up’ or ‘down’.
Here is a 360 degree view of the milky way from earth. I assume the brightest region is the galactic centre.
To further clarify this, the term ‘Milky Way’ is used to describe two things. The galaxy we live in, and the hazy band of light across the night sky. The OP is using the latter definition.
My copy of A Field Guide to Stars and Planets by Roger Tory Peterson (Editor), was published in 1983 so there’s little doubt the contents have been changed some since mine came out. But it would be hard to imagine that something like the same star maps would not be in more recent editions.
There are 24 maps with views of the sky at different hours for “looking north” and “looking south” in both northern and southern latitudes. The grayish band that represents the “bright part” (the plane) of the Milky Way is visible on every map, ranging from close to overhead to close to the horizon. Depending on the time of night and/or the season, a map will allow you to orient yourself for a best view.
Note well that all the stars you can see are in the Milky Way!
Although it may be a bit off-topic to mention, back in the early 60’s when a friend introduced me to the joys of “low pressure naked eye star-gazing” which was a glorified way of saying “learning the constellations and bright stars” we stayed up from sunset to sunup one night in the fall, and with the aid of an even older edition of the Field Guide were able to see all but about 25-35 degrees of the entire sky! The portion of the sky made invisible by the sun’s glare is just the hour’s worth on either end of the day when the glow from the sun is too much to make out the stars.
That’s another way of saying that if you wait a month for your next all-nighter, you can see everything in the night sky at your location. There are three major sections to the sky: 1) the stars that never set, 2) the stars that never rise, and 3) the ones that rise and set in any given night. That third group is what I was trying to describe as being available in a single night (minus the hour after sunset and the one before sunrise).
There are 12 zodiacal constellations, each taking up about 30 degrees of sky, so in the month (or so) it takes the sun to appear to move through one of them, that constellation is invisible at night.
Damn, everything’s different down under.
But it still could have been August for others.
Excellent point! Perhaps the point was/is that September may be the end of summer for us, while the end of winter for the ones on the other side of the equator. That’s why songs referring to months don’t do well in the other hemisphere.
All of the individual stars you can currently see with your naked eye, at least. The Andromeda Galaxy as a whole (well, mostly just the bright core) is naked-eye visible, telescopes can pick out a few individual stars in the Andromeda Galaxy and a few other nearby galaxies, and Supernova 1987A was naked-eye visible and in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to our own.