Milky Way

Have you ever looked up in the night sky and seen the Milky Way? I was watching a few videos on YouTube and it suddenly dawned on me (excuse the pun) that most people have never actually seen the stars, as the "light pollution" totally blocks the view.



Here are a couple of videos of what our night sky really looks like, if we don't have city lights shining all the time, and no "light pollution" to obscure the beautiful view (this is what the ancients would have seen all the time, no wonder they had amazing stories about the universe).

I liked some of the comments:

Yep. It's also known as "light pollution", whereas light in urban areas actually ends up shining outward, towards the sky, rather than downwards, where it's needed. This obscures almost all the stars visible from Earth. It's actually quite difficult to get shots like this. You need absolute darkness, no moon, and you need to be there when the Milky Way actually "rises" like we see in the video. But it's really worth going the way to witness this.

And:

have NEVER seen the sky like that. is it because i live in urban environment??

Or:

man I hate living in light polluted areas... I wish i lived out somewhere like this to see the night sky all the time.

The Japanese name, 銀河系 (ginga kei) means "galaxy" with the character for silver (gin) showing the way. Another common name is 天の川 (amanokawa) or "heavenly river" which sounds rather poetic! Here is a slow, beautiful time lapse movie of the Amanokawa from Lake Hakuba:



And here is a similar video from Kirigamine, Nagano, Japan, of sun rise and Milky Way rising:



I haven't done these posts recently, tagged "universe" but this is a good one: