The Milky Way!

Well, here it is, the Milky Way!  It is a magnificent thing to see, and I think when I was putting together a talk on light pollution for a high school class recently, I read that 80 percent of the population lives under light polluted skies and has never seen the Milky Way!  I remember seeing it as a kid growing up in Connecticut, but I don't believe you can see it now where I grew up.  So the Milky Way is actually our own galaxy.  It is enormous beyond imagining.  Think of it as a 33 RPM record - it has diameter of 87,000 light-years but is only about 1,000 light years thick for most of it, but there is a bulge at the center of the galaxy.  It contains between 100 and 400 billion stars!  Since we are in the flat part of the galaxy, out toward one edge, when we look up out of the galaxy, we don't see as many stars as we see if we look toward the center, or out toward the edge.  In any case, it is a magnificent thing to experience if you can see it from a dark-sky site, like out west, or in an area that is 100 miles away from even small cities.