THERE’S some real stars quality in the nightscapes nominated for the annual Milky Way Photographer of the Year.
Photos taken from space, Chile and the US are all in the running for the out-of-this-world picture prize.
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Travel blog Capture The Atlas revealed the sensational photos that have wowed judges at this year’s eighth annual competition.
Photographer Uroš Fink, who took a snap from an Austrian ice hut, said: “Undoubtedly my wildest location this winter – Austria’s Dobratsch mountain!
“The sky was magnificent, with Jupiter and Mars shining brightly.
“In the foreground is the cabin, where I spent three freezing hours waiting for the perfect shot of the Milky Way’s core.
“It turned out exactly as I envisioned—a true winter fairytale.”
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WHAT IS THE MILKY WAY
The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System.
It is a barred spiral galaxy, meaning it has a central bar-shaped structure composed of stars, and spiral arms that extend outward.
Here are some key features:
- Galactic Centre: A densely packed area of stars and other matter, believed to contain a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A*.
- Bulge: Surrounding the galactic centre, the bulge is a roughly spherical region filled with older stars.
- Disk: This flat, rotating disk contains most of the galaxy’s stars, gas, and dust, and includes the spiral arms.
- Halo: An extended, roughly spherical region surrounding the disk, containing older stars and globular clusters.
- Spiral Arms: These are regions of higher density that contain a lot of young stars, gas, and dust.
Our galaxy is about 100,000 light-years in diameter and contains between 100 billion and 400 billion stars. The Sun is located roughly 27,000 light-years from the galactic center, in one of the spiral arms known as the Orion Arm or Orion Spur.
The Milky Way rotates, with stars in the disk orbiting the galactic centre. The speed of rotation varies with distance from the centre.
The Milky Way is part of a group of galaxies known as the Local Group, which also includes the Andromeda Galaxy, the Triangulum Galaxy, and about 54 other smaller galaxies.
From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a milky band of light stretching across the sky, which is the combined light of billions of distant stars that are too faint to be seen individually.
