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SkyTour - Sagittarius - The Archer

Scorpio Cygnus

Sagitarius is one of my favorites, although you have to be fairly south (at least 35 degrees latitude) in order to get a really good luck at it. Sagittarius is close to Scorpius' tale. Its bright stars make up a house with a gabled roof. Sagittarius along with its neighbor of Scorpio is one of the brightest constellations lying along the ecliptic. But it also points to the thickest part of the Milky Way.

You will need good conditions to see the Milky Way, which to the naked eye looks like a slight whitish haze. One of Galileo's major discoveries was that the Milky Way actually consists of thousands of dim stars. You can see this if you look at Sagittarius through binoculars or a telescope.

The Milky Way is simply our local galaxy - a collection of 100 billion stars. The Milky Way consists of two spiraling arms, coming from a central point. Its diameter is 100,000 light years across. We're located on one of the spiral arms, quite far from the center. The Milky Way galaxy is much "thicker" in the center where the two arms meet. When we look towards Sagitarius we're looking at that center of our galaxy. It's like we're located in a suburb and off in the distance is the glow from the lights of the big city. By the way, there is very likely a giant black hole in the galaxy's center.

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