August means grand, and this month the sky features something truly august: the center of the galaxy. All naked-eye objects visible from the United States - absolutely everything on Earth and in the starry firmament (except for the Andromeda galaxy, now rising in the northeast) - revolve around this single spot in the summer sky. Yet a glance upward into the south reveals . . . absolutely nothing. You'll simply have to take it on faith that it's there.
You'd expect such a busy region to be bright and easy to spot. But the center of the galaxy is impossible to see, buried behind layers of obscuring dust. We don't even come close. The farthest objects discernible in visible wavelengths lie a few thousand light-years in the direction of the galactic center, which, according to astrometric data from the Hipparcos satellite, supposedly lay at a distance of 26,000 to 28,000 ...
