The magnificent Milky Way



The grandeur of the summer Milky Way (winter for southern hemisphere) across almost the entire sky can be seen very well in this 30 seconds shot taken from the Atacama desert. The view is similar with the naked eye in a very dark sky, even though the contrasts are not nearly as sharp and our eyes can’t see the real colors which, instead, any camera can emphasize. 

There is an impenetrable wall of stars in front of us; this is the only thing that comes to our mind. How is it possible for them to be so compressed together? How can they avoid colliding with each other?  We’re in a place unknown to us and our experience, where space is compressed and makes us see objects as though they were all at the same distance. 

The truth is that we are observing a crack tens of thousands of light years deep and objects that emit immense amounts of energy. The result? That on an average that sea of stars has the same density as the place where the Sun is: the stars all seem to be united, but there are tens of thousands of billions of miles of absolute emptiness between them. The sky of the orbit of any one of those stars wouldn’t be any brighter than ours, but it would show completely different stars and constellations.

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