Milky Way rise…

You’ve seen sunrises and moonrises, but have you ever seen a Milky Way rise?  The Milky Way is the galaxy our solar system resides in, contains at least 200 billion stars, and it’s a pretty magnificent sight if you get to see it in a truly dark sky.  Unfortunately, most people live in towns and cities where light pollution drains the sky of dark, rendering the Milky Way invisible, so it’s a real treat to get out to the country to see it once in a while.  When we’re looking up at the Milky Way, what we’re seeing is our galaxy from the inside, looking in towards the center.  Every individual star you see in the sky is also inside the Milky Way, and those bright bands of light in the Milky Way are clusters of individual stars that are so far away, they blend together as far as our eyes are concerned.

Here is a spectacular time-lapse video of the Milky Way rising in the sky, taken by photographer William Castleman at a Texas star party.  According to William:

The time-lapse sequence was taken with the simplest equipment that I brought to the star party. I put the Canon EOS-5D (AA screen modified to record hydrogen alpha at 656 nm) with an EF 15mm f/2.8 lens on a weighted tripod. Exposures were 20 seconds at f/2.8 ISO 1600 followed by 40 second interval. Exposures were controlled by an interval timer shutter release (Canon TC80N3). Power was provided by a Hutech EOS203 12v power adapter run off a 12v deep cycle battery. Large jpg files shot in custom white balance were batch processed in Photoshop (levels, curves, contrast, Noise Ninja noise reduction, resize) and assembled in Quicktime Pro. Editing/assembly was with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.

Make sure to click through for the HD version.

Awesome job, William – more people need to see things like this to understand what we’ve lost with the proliferation of light pollution in our urban and suburban areas.  It must have been something else to marvel at this nightly before light pollution was so common.  Thanks for the great video!