Photographer Captures 'Impossible' View of Milky Way from Light-Polluted Singapore

By: Nina Sen

Published: March 18,2014

An avid night sky photographer proves the naysayers wrong with this "impossible" single-exposure image and video of the Milky Way and bright planet Venus rising over the light-polluted skies of Singapore.
"My dream to capture the beautiful Milky Way galaxy in Singapore has finally come true this morning after the monsoon season is over," night sky photographer Justin Ng told Space.com in an email. He captured this single-exposure shot on Feb. 28, 2014 at 6:11 a.m. local time. "Singapore is known for its heavy light pollution and many people believe that it's impossible to shoot stars and Milky Way in Singapore."
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Ng made a video of the Milky Way and Venus over Singapore as proof of the feat.
Dense light pollution is apparent in the photo near the horizon, just below the Milky Way. Glowing planet Venus is visible toward the center of the shot, above the lone tree. [See more of Justin Ng's amazing night sky photography here]
"This image aims to prove the popular belief wrong and I hope to inspire more astrophotographers residing in heavily light polluted cities to try to capture these 'impossible' images," Ng said.
You can also see Ng's video of the Milky Way from Singapore on Vimeo here.
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy appearing as a dazzling band of light in the night sky. It comprises approximately 400 billion stars and stretches between 100,000 and 120,000 light-years in diameter. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).A massive black hole billions of times the size of the sun lies at the center of the galaxy.

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MORE: Facts About the Milky Way

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Earth is in a pretty remote spot in the Milky Way, about two-thirds of the way from the galaxy’s center to its edge on one of the Milky Way’s four arms. (NASA)



 

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Scientists are not quite sure how much mass the Milky Way itself has, but estimates fall somewhere around 500 billion to a few trillion times the mass of our sun. (ESO/S. Brunier)

 

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The Milky Way’s first stars formed about 13.5 billion years ago, only about 200 million years after the big bang. Earth, on the other hand, formed about 4.5 billion years ago. (ESA/Hubble)

 

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All of that stuff is not standing still. Our solar system (and all of us) orbit in space at about 515,000 miles per hour. At that rate, it takes approximately 225 to 250 million years to make one trip around the Milky Way’s center, a time period sometimes called a cosmic year or galactic year. (NASA)