NASA’s Picture of the Day Shows the Milky Way Across the Egyptian Skies

If we take a look back at history, Egyptians are well-known to be good astronomers. Since thousands of years before Christ, the Egyptians have been passionate about studying celestial bodies and the way they behave in space. We can mention, for instance, the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza, as it has been aligned with incredible precision to cardinal points and specific cosmic objects.

The Milky Way, on the other hand, is known for being the galaxy where our planet exists. The entire Solar System, along with hundreds of billions of stars, have their place in the Milky Way. In other words, it’s room for everybody!

But since humanity doesn’t have the right technology yet in order to travel to remote regions of the galaxy, that doesn’t mean that we can’t “bring” the Milky Way to us. That’s perhaps what NASA scientists had in mind when they decided to take a new mesmerizing picture of our galaxy. This time, we can see the celestial structure in the same frame as some parts of the Egyptian Desert.

NASA explained:

For ten years the stargazer dreamed of taking a picture like this. The dreamer knew that the White Desert National Park in Egypt’s Western Desert is a picturesque place hosting numerous chalk formations sculpted into surreal structures by a sandy wind. The dreamer knew that the sky above could be impressively dark on a clear moonless night, showing highlights such as the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy in impressive color and detail. So the dreamer invited an even more experienced astrophotographer to spend three weeks together in the desert and plan the composite images that needed to be taken and processed to create the dream image.

The Milky Way galaxy is home to somewhere between 100 billion and 200 billion stars, just in case you were thinking that your house is too big!