pdpfilms said:
Given how confident Josh is, I think I should offer him a bet: if he can't prove that its a fake, he buys rights to my photo. My fee is what our actual expenses were for the 2 week long vacation in Tanzania...roughly $16K.
When the money's in Escrow, I'll provide the file.
Okay, a bit more seriously...
I've read through the thread and there's a couple of things that come to mind.
First off, Jake is technically correct in claiming that the stars move, because the basic facts are that EVERYTHING is moving. However, where he seems to have tripped up is in separating out which effects come from which body's motion(s) and the "significance test" for each.
For the most local example, it gets dark once per day on the Earth because its rotation reveals/hides the Sun (sunrise, sunset).
More complex motion explains the phases of the moon, seasonal changes in the length of the day, how high the sun gets, etc, and these change at a rate fast enough to be perceived by man, whereupon he does things like build Stonehenge and other "alligns perfectly on one day per year" structures. These are closest to us, so their motion is the most easily detected...although a lot of what we're "seeing" is the rotation of the Earth.
A bit further away from Earth, the other planets also rotate around the sun. The ones that are classically most visible - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter & Saturn - were known to the ancient and were known as "wandering" stars because their paths were known to not be consistent with the "background" of supposedly "fixed" stars of the Ptolemy celestial sphere.
Basically, what came after the belief of a Flat Earth was geocentric model where the Earth was in the middle of the universe, and concentric spheres were defined around it for the moon, sun, etc. The sphere that was the furthest out were of the Heavens, which was considered to be outside of the universe, which was perceived as effectively ending as the surface of a giant hollow ball (that the Earth & everything was inside of), which had a bunch of pinholes ... the stars ... that through which shined the light of the Theological Heaven.
Suffice to say that Ptolemy's Geocentric model of the universe fell apart as we discovered more things in the night sky that had to be modeled. IIRC, explaining the erratic motion of planets became problemmatic once some basic Newtonian Physics Laws (such as "body remain in motion...") became better understood & accepted: the perceived motion of Venus ofen "bobs" up and down near the horizon, which violated basic laws of Conservation of Momentum.
In any event, the Ptolemic system did serve to address one question well, which was why the (true) stars always appeared in the same relative positions night after night after night, even if their orientation relative to the Earth changed day to day and seasonally. We can mimick this today with a standard globe of the Earth: spin and twirl it however you want, but the USA's position relative to Australia remains the same.
Which brings us back to those "everything's moving" stars. Essentially, because these stars are faaaaaaaar away, their rate of angular change is miniscule: not even measurable on a human scale (<100 years) with the naked eye.
To see stars shifing around in the sky that's not due to Earth rotation & precession with the naked eye, we would need a time machine and move around in millennia -to- geologic time scales. Scientists have done models of this stuff (ie, what the Big Dipper looked like during the Ice Age, etc); hopefully someone can find an illustration on the Internet.
Enough about all of that. On to the question of the Milky Way.
First, suppose that you live in a large housing development, with the typical streetlights. If you look out the windows of your house at night, will you be able to see at least one streetlight? Yup.
And if you don't live plumb dab in the middle of the development, the number of streetlights that you're able to see will vary by which direction you look: more towards the center, etc. If you're the guy whose house is on the literal edge of the development, you'll look out the back door and see *no* streetlights. But on the other side of your house, there's so many streetlights shining that you can read a newspaper by them.
The Milky Way galaxy is a billion star "housing development", and they all left a light on.
And probably just as good of a question to point out - if its not the Milky Way, then what is it?
BTW, my recollections from our pilot is that Mufindi (the place where the photo was taken) was around 2,000m elevation. This elevation would also help to clear the night sky too.
-hh
