The Milky Way Through the Summer Triangle
Explanation : There are more than a few stars in our Galaxy. The light from many of them combines to appear as a wisp of faint light across the night sky - the Milky Way . In the northern hemisphere, away from city lights and during the summer months, part of the Milky Way can be seen behind the Summer Triangle of stars - Deneb , Vega , and Altair . These are the brightest three stars in the above photograph , listed from left to right, respectively. If you could collect light in your eyes for 10 minutes at a time (instead of the usual 1/10th of a second), you might see something like the above photograph . Behind the Summer Triangle lies some of the vast star fields of our Milky Way Galaxy , containing literally billions of stars. The dark band across the middle that seems to divide the stars is actually interstellar dust , which absorbs more visible light than it emits and so appears dark.