The Milky Way, Rising at 5:30 AM

This is our home, the Milky Way Galaxy.  Think of it as a fried egg, sunny side up.  It is an enormous disk with a bulge in the center, made up of stars and gas and dust.  We live in the outer reaches of the galaxy, and as we look toward the center, we see it as band of bright stars, because we are viewing the galaxy from within.  The ancients saw this is milk spread across the sky.  Big Bend National Park is one of the darkest of the dark sky sites in the United States, and as such, we can see something like the Milky Way best, because if you live where light pollution is, the light in the sky obscures the faint glow that we see in this photograph.  For the curious, this was a 30 second exposure with an ISO of 6400, with the lens set to 17mm on my Canon 6D. Please click on the picture to see more detail.