page_title: Night sky
section_title: Other objects
hierarchical_section_title: Night sky / Visual presentation / Other objects
caption_attribution_description: English: High up in the Chilean Atacama Desert, pioneering feats of human engineering collide with the majestic beauty of the natural world. This image shows ESO’s La Silla Observatory, where domes housing some of the most advanced astronomical instruments in the world sit beneath a sky shimmering with stars. All of these stars belong to our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The Milky Way contains billions of stars, arranged in two strikingly different structures. The roughly spherical halo component, consisting mainly of older stars, appears in this image as the background of stars scattered across the sky. The second component is a thin disc made up of younger stars, gas and dust. We see this as a dense, bright, and visually stunning band running almost vertically across the sky. Pockets of dust block out the light from stars behind, giving the band a mottled appearance. The bright concentration in the band of stars, located toward the top centre of this image, is the central region of the Milky Way. Here, astronomers have measured stars moving very much faster than anywhere else in our galaxy. This is taken as evidence for a supermassive black hole, some four million times the mass of the Sun, at the very centre of our galaxy. The black hole cannot be observed directly, but its presence can be inferred from the effect its enormous gravity has on the motions of these nearby stars.
context_page_description: The term night sky, usually associated with astronomy from Earth, refers to the nighttime appearance of celestial objects like stars, planets, and the Moon, which are visible in a clear sky between sunset and sunrise, when the Sun is below the horizon.
  Natural light sources in a night sky include moonlight, starlight, and airglow, depending on location and timing. Aurorae light up the skies above the polar circles. Occasionally, a large coronal mass ejection from the Sun or simply high levels of solar wind may extend the phenomenon toward the Equator.
  The night sky and studies of it have a historical place in both ancient and modern cultures. In the past, for instance, farmers have used the status of the night sky as a calendar to determine when to plant crops. Many cultures have drawn constellations between stars in the sky, using them in association with legends and mythology about their deities.
  The anciently developed belief of astrology is generally based on the belief that relationships between heavenly bodies influence or convey information about events on Earth.
context_section_description: On clear dark nights in unpolluted areas, when the moon is thin or below the horizon, the Milky Way, a band of what looks like white dust, can be seen.
  The Magellanic Clouds of the southern sky are easily mistaken to be Earth-based clouds (hence the name) but are in fact collections of stars found outside the Milky Way known as dwarf galaxies.
  Zodiacal light is a glow that appears near the points where the sun rises and sets, and is caused by sunlight interacting with interplanetary dust.
  Shortly after sunset and before sunrise, artificial satellites often look like stars—similar in brightness and size—but move relatively quickly. Those that fly in low Earth orbit cross the sky in a couple of minutes. Some satellites, including space debris, appear to blink or have a periodic fluctuation in brightness because they are rotating. Satellite flares can appear brighter than Venus, with notable examples including the International Space Station (ISS) and Iridium Satellites.
  Meteors (commonly known as shooting stars) streak across the sky very infrequently. During a meteor shower, they may average one a minute at irregular intervals, but otherwise their appearance is a random surprise. The occasional meteor will make a bright, fleeting streak across the sky, and they can be very bright in comparison to the night sky.
  Aircraft are also visible at night, distinguishable at a distance from other objects because their lights blink.
caption: The Milky Way contains billions of stars, arranged in two strikingly different structures: halo and disc.[7]
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