The Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies

Our Galaxy Inside Out The Sun is one of millions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy.  When you look at the night sky, all the stars you see are the ones in our galaxy that are relatively close to us.  The other stars in our galaxy are so far away that we can't see them as separate stars.  Instead, they appear to us as the Milky Way, a "cloud" of light that stretches across the night sky.  Our trip to South Africa included glorious views of the Milky Way (Fig. 1).		Technical Notes for Fig. 1.  Camera: Canon A1 35 mm SLR camera with Sigma 24 mm wide angle lens; camera "piggybacked" on telescope.  Telescope: Meade ETX-90 (90 mm aperture, 1250 mm focal length) with 9 mm illuminated reticle eyepiece for manual guiding of telescope.  Telescope mount: Losmandy GM-8 equatorial mount with digital clock drive.  Exposure: 12 minutes at f/2.8 on Kodak E200 Ektachrome Professional slide film, ISO 200.
Fig. 1.  The Milky Way around the constellation Crux, the Southern Cross, in the night sky over South Africa on the night of 2004 June 8 at approximately 10:00 pm local time.  The Southern Cross can only be seen from the southern hemisphere and is as familiar there as the Big Dipper is to us in the northern hemisphere.  To show/hide an outline of the Southern Cross, click here.  This photograph was made during our trip to see the Venus transit.
Our Sister Andromeda Our Milky Way Galaxy is just one of many galaxies in the universe.  One of the nearest galaxies to us is the Andromeda Galaxy, sometimes called our "sister" galaxy because it is also a spiral galaxy like our own.  If we could observe our own galaxy from afar, it would look something like the Andromeda Galaxy.  One summer night in 2004, we noticed the air was particularly clear and still, and we took advantage of the conditions to photograph the Andromeda Galaxy (Fig. 2).		Technical Notes for Fig. 2.  Camera: Canon Digital Rebel SLR camera with Sigma 70-200 mm telephoto zoom lens (zoomed out to maximum) with Sigma 1.4X teleconverter.  Telescope mount: camera mounted directly on Losmandy GM-8 equatorial mount with digital clock drive, tracking unguided.  Exposure: series of 17 exposures of 3 minutes each at f/4 with ISO 400 setting.  Processing: aligned and stacked with Registax program; color correction and contrast enhancement with Photoshop.
Fig. 2.  The Andromeda Galaxy from our driveway in Cockeysville, Maryland, on the night of 2004 August 23 at approximately 11:30 pm EDT.  The glow of light is from the galaxy's millions of stars, too far away to see as separate stars.

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