The Milky Way

Milky Way @ Great Basin National Park, Nevada

The Milky Way @ Mono Lake South Tufa State Reserve, Lee Vining, California

This is my very first post about our recent summer road trip, because frankly, I still do not have all the energy to blog because all I do after getting home is sleep, sleep, and well, BEACH ( 10 days away from the ocean makes me miss it and my first ocean breeze back home was helping me recuperate from the tiredness)!  One of the highlights of our trip is experiencing the dark sky and seeing our galaxy, the Milky Way. We sure had a wonderful 10 day hiking and exploring the wonders of nature, but the icing of the cake at the end of some days at Great Basin and Lee Vining was seeing the Milky Way. 

Us and The Milky Way @ Mono Lake South Tufa State Reserve, California
(my cousin and friend joined us in the last 3 days of our trip at Lee Vining, California, whereas the first 7 days at Utah and Nevada, there were just the 3 of us, hubby and his niece)

About a century ago, almost everyone could see the Milky Way from their backyard, but these days, the Milky Way can only be observed in places with very dark sky, meaning, has less light pollution from the big cities. Thanks to hubby's niece, for making the Milky Way part of planning for this trip, it surely was such a wonderful experience, that for now, all I could do is dream of dark skies again to see the Milky Way. 

The Milky Way Description below is from Wikipedia:

"The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System.This name derives from its appearance as a dim "milky" glowing band arching across the night sky, in which the naked eye cannot distinguish individual stars. The fact that this faint band of light is made up of stars was proven in 1610 when Galileo Galilei used his telescope to resolve it into individual stars. In the 1920s, observations by astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies. The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy 100,000–120,000 light-years in diameter containing 100–400 billion stars. It may contain at least as many planets. The Solar System is located within the disk, around two thirds of the way out from the Galactic Center, on the inner edge of a spiral-shaped concentration of gas and dust called the Orion Arm. The stars in the inner ≈10,000 light-years form a bulge and one or more bars". - source: Wikipedia

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