I never get tired of time-lapse videos of the sky. Here's a lovely one, taken in September by photographer Justin Majeczsky, showing the Milky Way rising over Lake Tahoe in the western US:
[embed width="610"] http://vimeo.com/14718221 [/embed]
Cooool. Things like this make it a whole lot easier to grasp that we live inside the disk of a spiral galaxy. From our vantage point 25,000 light years or so out, you can see the central bulge of the galaxy moving across the sky. That's the combined might of billions of stars and octillions of tons of gas and dust! If you pause the video four or five seconds in and look to the upper left corner, you can see the stars making up the constellation of Sagittarius. They make a teapot shape! [You can check a map I recently posted
of that area of the sky as well; the Teapot is ...
