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Jimmy Westlake: Milky Way shines bright

Jimmy Westlake
The misty star clouds of the Milky Way arch across the late summer sky above Stagecoach in June 2009. The bright clouds are made of countless stars in the distance. The dark clouds are real clouds of interstellar dust that block the light of the stars beyond. The “X” marks the direction to the center of the Milky Way.
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The misty star clouds of the Milky Way arch across the late summer sky above Stagecoach in June 2009. The bright clouds are made of countless stars in the distance. The dark clouds are real clouds of interstellar dust that block the light of the stars beyond. The “X” marks the direction to the center of the Milky Way.

“Faint and misty, soft as silk,

Some say you are made of milk.

Road to heaven, river of light,



Glowing star clouds fill the night.”

— Jimmy Westlake, 2010



When the bright moon is not in the sky, the dark summer night reveals one of its most spectacular treasures — the soft, misty glow of the Via Lactea, or the Milky Way. Contrary to what the ancient Romans believed, the Milky Way is not made of milk at all but is the combined light of billions of distant suns, unresolved by the unaided eye. In China, the Milky Way has been known as the “silver river,” and many aboriginal peoples know it as “the backbone of the night.” One of my favorites is the Cherokee name that means “the way the dog ran away.” Their legend tells of a mischievous dog that grabbed a bag of cornmeal and ran off to the north, spilling cornmeal along the way.

If you look through a pair of binoculars and sweep across the Milky Way, you will rediscover what Galileo did in 1610: a multitude of faint stars. The situation is similar to flying high over a sandy beach and seeing the white sand stretch for miles in both directions, and yet, you cannot see the individual sand grains that make up the beach from that height. In this case, the grains of sand are the stars that populate the Milky Way.

The Milky Way is our home galaxy, a spiraling collection of hundreds of billions of stars, more or less like our sun. The word “galaxy” literally means “milk,” from the Greek word “galax.” Because it is flattened like a pancake, and we peer outward from within that pancake, we see the spiral arms wrapped gently around us in a narrow band that runs almost north to south on summer evenings.

Look closely, and you’ll notice that the band of the Milky Way seems to split into two parallel branches just south of the familiar Summer Triangle of stars Vega, Deneb and Altair. This “Great Rift” in the Milky Way, as it is known, is caused by enormous clouds of opaque dust thousands of light-years away that eclipse our view of the stars beyond.

South of the Great Rift and above the Teapot asterism of Sagittarius is one of the brightest regions of the Milky Way. When we peer off into this direction, we are looking directly toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy, some 28,000 light years away. We cannot view the center directly, though, because of the intervening stars, gas and dust. There is mounting evidence that a supermassive black hole lurks at the heart of our galaxy.

Experiencing the subtle beauty of the Milky Way has become a privilege that many Americans never will have. A large percentage of our nation’s population lives in or near a large city where human light pollution drowns out this natural wonder. To them, the Milky Way is something that you read about in a book or see pictures of in a planetarium. Streetlights and spotlights aimed skyward scatter so much unnecessary light into the night sky that it overwhelms all but the brightest stars. Many cities are making efforts to curb this urban light pollution to preserve the beauty of the nighttime sky.

In Northwest Colorado, all we have to do is step out into our backyard to see the galaxy of which we are a part, the majestic Milky Way.

Professor Jimmy Westlake teaches astronomy and physics at Colorado Mountain College’s Alpine Campus. He is an avid astronomer whose photographs and articles have been published all around the world. Check out Jimmy’s astrophotography website at http://www.jwestlake.com.


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