Stargazing

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Updated:Thursday August 28 2008,15:00 EDT- P.E.Trudeau Airport

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This Week in the Sky

Cruising the River of Starlight

Away from the glow of city light pollution this week you might notice a ghostly grayish ribbon arching across the night sky. Stretching from the northern horizon in Perseus, through the cross-shaped constellation Cygnus overhead, and down to Sagittarius in the south, the Milky Way band is packed with stars.

Countless number of these stars are many thousands of light years away and so we can only see their combined light as a faint milky glow. A flattened spiral structure, our galaxy is 100,000 light years wide and is a community of 100 billion stars including our own Sun.

While every star visible to the naked eye belongs to our home galaxy, the river of starlight we see is from just one of its star-filled spiral arms. Being over 30,000 light-years from the Milky Way's centre, it takes our Sun 300 million years to make one trip around the Milky Way.

- Andrew Fazekas