Starship Asterisk*

The Milky Trail

Explanation: Have you ever hiked the Queen's Garden trail in Bryce Canyon, Utah, USA, planet Earth? Walking along that path in this dark night skyscape, you can almost imagine your journey continues along the pale, luminous Milky Way. Of course, the name for our galaxy, the Milky Way (in Latin, Via Lactea), does refer to its appearance as a milky band or path in the sky. In fact, the word galaxy itself derives from the Greek for milk. Visible on moonless nights from dark sky areas, though not so bright or quite so colorful as in this image, the glowing celestial band is due to the collective light of myriad stars along the plane of our galaxy, too faint to be distinguished individually. The diffuse starlight is cut by dark swaths of obscuring galactic dust clouds. Four hundred years ago, Galileo turned his telescope on the Milky Way and announced it to be "... a congeries of innumerable stars ..."

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Learned a new Swedish word from this APOD. Vintergatan. In English--->Winter street. Of course remembering it, and getting a chance to use it... is something else altogether.

Wonderful shot and panorama!

It's fun to see all those names of the Milky Way. I like Chinese 銀河 "Silver River", Catalan Camí de Sant Jaume, "The Road to Santiago". Cherokee Gili Ulisvsdanvyi "The Way the Dog Ran Away", Georgian ირმის ნახტომი, irmis naxtomi "The Deer Jump", Irish Bealach na Bó Finne "The Fair Cow's Path" and Claí Mór na Réaltaí "Great Fence of the Stars", Latvian Putnu Ceļš, The Birds' Path, Maltese Triq Sant' Anna, "St Anne's way" and ทางช้างเผือก "The way of the white elephant".

Ann

In this view the Earth seems totally overturned. The impression is accentuated by the tortuous ravine below.

We call dead trees, "SNAGS"....so....the one snag in the middle with the 3 "fingers" looks like it is reaching up into the Milky Way!!! And several others look like they are reaching with it

Nice shot.

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