"Baade's Window"

We've all looked up at one time or another to see the bright band of the Milky Way stretching across our winter skies, but did you know that milky band of light comes from millions of stars that trace one of the spiral arms in our own galaxy.

"Baade's Window", named after the astronomer who selected this area of the sky for his study of variable stars, is the one of the most densely packed star fields that we can see when we look toward the centre of own galaxy, the Milky Way. The image below shows perhaps millions of stars in an area of the sky less than 1 degree wide, and a bright globular star cluster NGC 6522 dominates the centre of the field. Another globular star cluster which appears at bottom left is NGC 6528, note the different colours of each globular cluster. The apparent absence of stars in the dark lanes that appear throughout the field are actually wisps of dark interstellar dust stretching across the foreground and obscuring background stars from view.

Globular Star Cluster NGC 6522 (centre)
Globular Star Cluster NGC 6528 (bottom)

This image cropped and drastically reduced from original 3072x2048 image.
Exposures: 1 image
Exposure time: 608 seconds (10 minutes).
Settings: RAW,3072x2048,ISO400,AWB,+1,+1,+1,Norm.
Seeing: Good.