dipper@utastro.UUCP (Debbie Byrd) (08/14/85)
Our own galaxy -- the Milky Way -- hides other galaxies from view. More -- after this. August 14 Maffei One and Two If you're out in the country on a dark, moonless night, you can trace the starlit band of the Milky Way across the dome of the sky. Remember when you see it that you're looking sideways into the galactic plane -- from a location inside our galaxy. Only three other galaxies can be seen with the naked eye by observers on Earth. Two of these are small satellite galaxies of the Milky Way -- seen only from the southern hemisphere of Earth. Northern observers see the Andromeda galaxy as a faint fuzzy smudge visible in the evening in autumn. But the Milky Way itself is a celestial curtain. It hides about one fifth of extragalactic space from our view. The interstellar dust and gas and the billions of stars of our own galaxy conceal other galaxies -- those located in the direction of the plane of the Milky Way. Astronomers use infrared and radio wavelengths to investigate the galaxies we can't see. Two such galaxies lie in the direction of the constellation Cassiopeia -- the distinctive W-shaped star pattern above the northern horizon in the evening around now. These two galaxies are called Maffei One and Two, for the Italian astronomer who discovered them in 1968. Maffei One could be one of the biggest and brightest galaxies we'd see in our sky -- if it weren't obscured by the Milky Way. You'd still need a dark sky to see it -- but if you could raise the star-studded curtain of our galaxy -- Maffei One would stretch over one-half of the moon's diameter across the celestial dome. Script by Diana Hadley. (c) Copyright 1984, 1985 McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin