The Mother Galaxy

The Milky Way, our mother galaxy and home to 200 billion stars, is seen from the Earth sky as a band of light circling the entire sky in both hemispheres. In this view above the light house of Pointe du Raz, an extension of Brittany into the Atlantic Ocean at the western tip of France, the Milky Way is visible in constellations Aquila (lowest), Cygnus, Lacerta, and Cassiopeia (highest). There is only one object visible in this wide field which is outside of our Milky Way. Note the little elongated cloud at the upper left. Visible to unaided eye from any dark location, this is Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the closest neighboring spiral galaxy, similar to our Milky Way, at the distance of over 2.5 million light years away. That means the light we are seeing now belongs to 2.5 million years before. © Laurent Laveder