Tourist’s guide to the Milky Way

THERE’S AN OLD STORY about a bunch of miners sheltering in a hut. They have a joke book, but everybody has read it so often they’ve memorised it, so when someone wants to tell a joke they simply call out the page number. Well, the ‘big, bold, bright and beautiful’ highlights I’ll cover in this article are a bit like that. The sky region we’ll be looking at — Sagittarius and its neighbours — contains just so many amazing deep sky sights.

Why? Because when we look in that direction, we’re gazing right into the gravitational hub around which everything else in our galaxy revolves. Globular clusters hover around it like bees around a hive, nebulae (both bright and dark) abound and the sky is thick with stars.

Toward the centre

Let’s make our first stop right at the very heart of the galaxy, lying some 26,000 light-years away. Normally we wouldn’t be able to see it through all the intervening gas and dust, but in the 1940s German astronomer Walter Baade discovered that there’s a small gap in the clouds that let him peer all the way to the core. That in his honour.