The Milkyway
Captured and Submitted by Jordan Botta
Location: Kelletville, PA
Date/Time: July 20, 2020. 2:26am
Camera: iPhone 11; 30 second exposure
The image above was taken and submitted by one of our collaborators, Jordan Botta.
Botta captured one of the rarer sites for city/town dwelling people: The Milkyway! The Milkyway is the name of the galaxy that we live in along with 400,000 billion other stars! The haze you see, captured by Jordan, is the collective light of tens- or hundreds of billions of stars! Normally this is a sight only offered to those who drive out far enough from the light pollution of towns and cities, but armed with only a camera and a little bit of patience, Jordan was able to capture the faint glow of the arm of our Milkyway galaxy, the arm in which we live in!
The Milkyway is called a spiral galaxy and we live in one of the arms called the “Orion Spur”. What we see in Jordan’s image is our galaxy’s arm edge on!
Due to light pollution, Jordan was not able to see all the detail one might see in a designated dark location like Cherry Springs, in Pennsylvania, but I wanted to show everyone that we can explore what’s out there, even if you only have your phone camera and the imagination to seek a different perspective through the [darkness/pollution!
An artist’s rendition of the Milkyway galaxy, obtained from NASA’s website.
We don’t have any real images of our Milkyway. We’ve never sent a probe out far enough to get an image like this! With our current technology, it would take us millions, or billions of years to get anything out this far!
