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Milky Way Viewing Season
"The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters."
~ Galileo Galilei, 1610
Kilted astronomers and stargazers, take note! Impress your friends with this beautifully composed tartan which has designed into the sett colourful elements of our own Milky Way galaxy!
The Milky Way, our home galaxy, is a magnificent barred spiral structure composed of nearly 300 billion stars, interwoven with interstellar dust, gas, and glowing nebulae. Nestled within one of its smaller spiral arms—the Orion Arm—our Sun is but a single point of light among countless others in this vast cosmic system.
This tartan draws visual inspiration from the Milky Way itself. The lighter bands woven through the design evoke the bright, dense starfields that trace the galactic plane, while the darker areas represent the so-called Zone of Avoidance—a region veiled by cosmic dust and stellar crowding that obscures our view.
Also threaded through this galactic motif are striking red lines, a nod to the phenomenon of cosmological redshift, the stretching of light caused by the universe's continual expansion. These vibrant streaks hint at the restless nature of the cosmos and the dynamic motion of celestial bodies.
Though it may appear still to our eyes, the Milky Way is anything but static. It is currently on a slow-motion collision course with the Andromeda galaxy, its spiral twin. But there's no need for alarm—this grand galactic merger will play out over the next 4.5 billion years, a slow cosmic dance unfolding on a scale far beyond human lifetimes. That's one very long galactic kilt flip equivalent! 💙 💜 🖤 💗 ⭐💫 🔭 🌌
In western culture, the name "Milky Way" for our view of our own galaxy is derived from its appearance as a dim un-resolved "milky" glowing band arching across the night sky. The term is a translation of the Classical Latin via lactea, in turn derived from the Hellenistic Greek for "milky circle". In Greek mythology, the Milky Way was supposedly created from the forceful suckling of Heracles, when Hera acted as a wet nurse for the young hero.
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. And until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe. Observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies - now estimated as hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe.
This tartan, designed by Carol A.L. Martin, represents a view of the Milky Way with the light bands showing the concentration of stars located in the direction of the galactic plane along with the dark regions in the Zone of Avoidance where the light is blocked by interstellar dust. The red lines represent the cosmological red shift, due to the expansion of the universe.
Generally the dense part of the Milky Way is best viewed when it is as high as possible in the Southern sky. Facing south during April and May the pre-dawn hours are best. From June to early August the best time is near midnight, though the Milky Way will be visible almost all night. From Mid August through September the best time is soon after the sun has set and the sky has grown dark. The farther North you go, the lower in the southern sky the Milky Way will be. If you live above 65 degrees north, you will never see the Milky Way core because it never rises above your local horizon.
For details on this latest announcement of an X-shaped formation within our galaxy, click the "Nature Speaks" photo by Michael Shainblum.