milkey way

Milky Way in the Desert
Photo: Babak A. Tafreshi

The plane of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, seems to cascade over sandstone hills in a long-exposure nighttime shot taken earlier this month in Algeria’s Tassili n’Ajjer National Park, in the heart of the Sahara. The bright “star” at left is the gas giant planet Jupiter. A UN World Heritage site, Tassili n’Ajjer is famous for its caves filled with thousands of drawings and engravings that date as far back as 6000 B.C. Photographer Babak Tafreshi writes on The World At Night (TWAN) astrophotography website that “prehistoric skygazers surely witnessed a similar sky.”