Yes, you can see the Milky Way!

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Can you see the Milky Way at night with the naked eye?

Requirements:
1. Dark skies - no moonlight, no city lights, no headlights, no streetlights
2. At least one eyeball - no telescopes, no binoculars, (just eyeglasses if you're near sighted)
3. A little bit of timing - late summer or winter evenings are good.

More details:
1. Dark skies are unfortunately hard to come by for many people these days. Almost any sizable town or city generates enough light pollution (stray light that scatters from the light source, up into the sky, and then back down into your eye) to wash out the faint Milky Way. Bright moonlight does the trick too, making the sky too bright to see the Milky Way. Sunlight of course is the worst - the scattered light makes the sky so bright you can't even see bright stars, let alone the faint Milky Way. If you want to see how widely spread light pollution is in your area, take a look at a picture of the US (or your country) as seen from space at night. If you can identify your town, you probably won't see the Milky Way. If you travel out of town to one of the black regions you'll do much better. For more dark sky information and some links to nighttime pictures of the earth try the International Dark-Sky Association.

2. Once you have your dark skies. All you need is your eyes. The Milky Way is a diffuse wash of brightness across the sky. With dark skies your eyes can easily pick out this hazy glow. Give your eyes at least 10 minutes to adapt to the darkness though. Your eyes become more sensitive to low light level after spending a while in the dark (as you well know after walking from a darkened theater out into bright sunlight).
Because the Milky Way is a large diffuse object in the sky, binoculars and telescopes don't really help your viewing of it. In much the same way, binoculars and telescopes aren't much help if you're looking at clouds or rainbows in the daytime sky.

3. Timing is the last element you need. Not accurate timing though. You just have to have some idea of what season of the year it is, and whether it's before of after midnight. The Milky Way, like the individual stars in the sky, is basically fixed in place. It is a circular band stretching 360 degrees around the sky. As the earth rotates on its axis (once each day) different parts of the Milky Way would be visible. (The analogy here is a merry-go-round. As you ride around, you see different parts of the surrounding scenery sweep by, but at at any given time the view of half of your surroundings is blocked by the merry-go-round itself.) So the brightest parts of the Milky Way will only be visible at certain times of the day. ("Sidereal day" to be exact - if you don't know what that is, give it a try on your favorite search engine or encyclopedia.) Then there's the Sun. As the Earth revolves about the Sun (once each year), the Sun seems to crawl around the sky in a great circle. The consequence of this is that if it's the time of year that the Sun in near the object you want to see, then you're out of luck. Anytime your object of interest is above the horizon, the Sun will be too. You will have to wait a few weeks for the Sun to move on.

Finally (!), the pictures and tables below show you when and where to look. (You can click on each picture for a larger version.) Each picture shows the full sky. The horizon is the brown band around the edge, with directions labeled. The zenith (straight overhead) is at the center of the map. The Milky Way is shown as a blue band across the sky (it won't look blue when you see it though). The maps show it at the best times (listed in the tables) when it arcs directly overhead. If you look a few hours earlier or later, the Milky Way will still be there. It will just no longer, (or not yet) be straight overhead. With dark skies you'll still find it.

The summer Milky Way will look brighter than the winter Milky Way. The edges are not as sharp as shown in these pictures, but some details really can be seen. Most noticeably you should be able to see the Great Rift in the Milky Way in good dark skies. This dark lane in the Milky Way between Cygnus (Cyg) and Scutum (Sct) is where a string of dense interstellar clouds block the view of more distant stars. At longer wavelengths in the infrared, light passes through these clouds more easily and we get a better view of the overall shape of our Galaxy, but there are still enough clouds created a dark reddened lane through the middle of the Milky Way.

Summer Milky Way

Date Time Oct 14 8 PM Sep 29 9 PM Sep 14 10 PM Aug 30 11 PM Aug 15 12 AM Jul 31 1 AM Jul 16 2 AM

Winter Milky Way

Date Time Feb 10 8 PM Jan 25 9 PM Jan 10 10 PM Dec 26 11 PM Dec 12 12 AM Nov 26 1 AM Nov 11 2 AM

Rick Arendt -- July 24, 2002

(Southern hemisphere residents, click here for maps.)
(Pictures created using Voyager II, 2.0 for the Macintosh. Carina Software)