Welcome to the Milky Way

Abstract

Observing the stars is a great pastime. The pleasure becomes even greater when we comprehend our vantage point and what the objects we are ­looking at represent in terms of parts of a greater structure, like the Milky Way. Most classic astronomy books project the universe onto a celestial sphere, a huge hemispheric dome, with the observer at the center of it. The concept of the celestial sphere is very useful to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies such as the Sun, the stars and the planets. We deliberately did not follow this approach in this book because imagining all the ­celestial objects on a dome takes away the depth of field.