Stars and Civilizations

The disc of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is photographed above valleys of small towns and villages near Bursa, Turkey. Move the slider on the image to see all the constellation lines and labels. As noted by the photographer “I was on a high altitude point of Mount Uludag. As I started taking the pictures to make this panorama, the planetary triplet of Venus, Mars, and Saturn was about to be lost in the horizon haze due west (lower right). But suddenly Jupiter surprised me by appearing from the opposite direction. I did not expect to see it through the horizon dust layers before the triplet sets, as Jupiter and Saturn were 178 degrees apart that night. That was thanks to my 2536-meter high vantage point allowing me to see beyond the normal horizon, with a depression of as much as 2 degrees.”