Starship Asterisk*

Under the Galaxy

Explanation: The Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, stands above the southern horizon in this telephoto view from Las Campanas Observatory, planet Earth. In the dark September skies of the Chilean Atacama desert, the small galaxy has an impressive span of about 10 degrees or 20 Full Moons. The sensitive digital camera's panorama has also recorded a faint, pervasive airglow, otherwise invisible to the eye. Apparently bright terrestrial lights in the foreground are actually very dim illumination from the cluster of housing for the observatory astronomers and engineers. But the flattened mountain top along the horizon just under the galaxy is Las Campanas peak, home to the future Giant Magellan Telescope.

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The LMC looks quite impressive in this picture. Does the human eye see just a smudge in the sky or something more?

bls0326 wrote:The LMC looks quite impressive in this picture. Does the human eye see just a smudge in the sky or something more?

The LMC has the same surface brightness as the band of the Milky Way. So yes, what most people would describe as a smudge.

bls0326 wrote: Does the human eye see just a smudge in the sky or something more?

To my eye, when I saw it long ago, it was just as if a couple of shards of the Milky Way had slipped off and fallen a bit: the surface brightness was the same as that of the Milky Way. (It blows my mind to think of all my ancestors who saw the Milky Way so clearly, and in those distant days so often, and who yet had no idea at all what it was. And think of Galileo first looking at it through his telescope, and seeing it dissolve into myriad stars --- stars which surely must be vastly farther away than the stars that speckle our sky.)

OK.... on my Bucket List...
Really nice view!!!

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Chris/heehaw: thanks for the replies.

Brian