You’ve almost certainly seen photos of the Milky Way, usually taken by photographers who travel way out into the middle of nowhere to get them. They’re cosmically beautiful, colorful and timeless. Now, for a brief period, it’s possible for you to catch a direct glimpse of the Milky Way.
The Milky Way — no, not the candy bar — is Earth’s home galaxy. NASA describes it as “a spiral galaxy with a disk of stars spanning more than 100,000 light years,” and the space agency notes that Earth is located along one of the galaxy’s spiral arms, about halfway from the center. Our solar system takes about 240 million years to complete a single orbit of the Milky Way. Even though we’re part of the Milky Way, we can sometimes see the central disk of it arcing across the sky, looking like a “faint, milky band of light,” NASA notes.
Earth is right in the thick of the proverbial action, which…
