The Milky Way will be visible this weekend. Here's how to see it
"The best time to see the Milky Way in (Massachusetts) is from March to September," according to the Capture the Atlas website.
The best part? You don't need any fancy telescopes or equipment to view it.
The Milky Way is our home galaxy with a disc of stars that spans more than 100,000 light-years. Because it appears as a rotating disc curving out from a dense central region, the Milky Way is known as a spiral galaxy.
Our planet sits along one of the galaxy's spiral arms, about halfway from the center, according to NASA.
The Milky Way sits in a cosmic neighborhood called the Local Group that includes more than 50 other galaxies. Those galaxies can be as "small" as a dwarf galaxy with up to only a few billion stars or as large as Andromeda, our nearest large galactic neighbor.
The Milky Way got its name because from our perspective on Earth, it appears as a faint, milky band of light stretching across the sky.
The Capture the Atlas website states that, "from July to August: The Milky Way is visible during the middle of the night."
Though the Milky Way is generally always visible from Earth, certain times of year are better for stargazers to catch a glimpse of the band of billions of stars.
But because visibility from Earth depends on the latitude, the further south you go, the longer the Milky Way season will last. For instance, in the Northern Hemisphere, which includes the continental United States, the best time to see the Milky Way is generally from March to September, according to Capture the Atlas.
What you're looking at when the Milky Way is visible is the bright center of our galaxy, "seen edge-on from our position within the galaxy's disk," Preston Dyches, who hosts NASA's "What's Up," a monthly video series that describes what's happening in the night sky, wrote for NASA.
The center of the Milky Way, which Dyches refers to as "the core," became visible in June and is expected to shine every night through August as it gets higher in a darker sky.
Typically, the sky is darkest from about midnight to 5 a.m., according to Capture the Atlas. You can check sunrise and sunset times at your location using the website TimeAndDate.
"This doesn't mean that as soon as the sun goes down you can see the Milky Way," writes Dan Zafra, co-founder of Capture the Atlas. "Even if it's in the sky, the Milky Way will be barely visible during blue hour, so you'll have to wait at least until the end of the astronomical twilight to see all the details of the Milky Way."
Stargazers can observe the Milky Way galaxy by looking for the Summer Triangle, a shape formed by "three bright stars" that spans across the Milky Way, according to science news website LiveScience.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the Milky Way rises in the southeast, travels across the southern sky and sets in the southwest, according to Weather.com.
The Milky Way can be seen clearly with the naked eye.
But in a past interview with USA Today Network, Tim Brothers, Massachusetts Institute of Technology technical Instructor and observatory manager, said with any case of stargazing, it's much better if you're using a good telescope or a pair of binoculars.
Eric Lagatta contributed to this report. He is the Space Connect reporter for the USA Today Network.
This article originally appeared on wickedlocal.com: You'll be able to see the Milky Way this weekend. Here's how
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