Tag Archives: astronomy
Saturn in Opposition
The ringed-planet is visible dusk until dawn.
Our home is between, opposite the sun.
Rising in the east at the sunset.
Peaking at midnight, setting west at sunrise.
Distant. Closest and brightest for this year.
Beyond What Is Seen
The mathematics told him that the star
was beyond the Milky Way, whole galaxies
beyond ours, but a young girl tending sheep
long before him looked into the night sky
and knew there was something unseen beyond.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau – Young Shepherdess Standing (1887)
Astronomer Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of other galaxies beyond the Milky Way in 1924. Before he made his discovery, everyone thought that our Milky Way galaxy was the only galaxy in the universe, and that there wasn’t much outside it besides the Magellanic Clouds, which were thought to be clouds of gas or dust. We know now that the Magellanic Clouds are really dwarf galaxies. He renamed the Andromeda Nebula the “Andromeda galaxy,” and he went on to discover 23 more separate galaxies. Within a few years of Hubble’s discovery, most astronomers came to agree that our galaxy is just one of millions.
