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The Milky Way Over Portland

The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. The term Milky Way is a translation of the Latin via lactea, from the Greek γαλακτικός κύκλος (galaktikos kýklos), meaning "milky circle." From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from within. Galileo Galilei first resolved the band of light into individual stars with his telescope in 1610. Until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe. Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies.

 

The teapot shaped constellation low down and just above the lights of Portland is Sagittarius whicvh is one of the constellations of the zodiac and is located in the Southern celestial hemisphere. It is one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy and remains one of the 88 modern constellations. Its name is Latin for "archer". Sagittarius is commonly represented as a centaur pulling back a bow. It lies between Scorpius and Ophiuchus to the west and Capricornus and Microscopium to the east.

 

The center of the Milky Way lies in the westernmost part of Sagittarius (see Sagittarius A).

 

The brightest object in the sky here is Jupiter which is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but slightly less than one-thousandth the mass of the Sun. Jupiter is the third brightest natural object in the Earth's night sky after the Moon and Venus. People have been observing it since prehistoric times; it was named after the Roman god Jupiter, the king of the gods, because of its observed size.

 

To the left of Jupiter and the second brightest object in the sky here is Saturn which is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius of about nine and a half times that of Earth.It only has one-eighth the average density of Earth; however, with its larger volume, Saturn is over 95 times more massive.

 

Across the bay the Isle of Portland is a tied island, 6 kilometres (4 mi) long by 2.7 kilometres (1.7 mi) wide, in the English Channel. The southern tip, Portland Bill lies 8 kilometres (5 mi) south of the resort of Weymouth, forming the southernmost point of the county of Dorset, England. A barrier beach called Chesil Beach joins it to the mainland. The A354 road passes down the Portland end of the beach and then over the Fleet Lagoon by bridge to the mainland. The population of Portland is 12,797.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_(constellation)

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Portland

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Uploaded on March 13, 2022
Taken on July 21, 2020