Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Tuesday, July 26th.  The sun rises at 6:22.  It’ll be up for 14 hours and 53 minutes, setting at 9:15.   The moon, 3 days past last quarter, will rise at 3:01 tomorrow morning.

The Milky Way, which is rising to pass overhead later in the evening is what we see of a huge structure of stars of which we are a part.  We call it the Milky Way galaxy.  It’s a spiral galaxy with a straight bar of stars through the center, a barred spiral galaxy about a hundred thousand light years across.  It’s part of a small cluster of galaxies called the Local Group.  Besides these three dozen galaxies, the Milky Way has small satellite galaxies orbiting it.  The largest of these are the two Magellanic clouds seen from the southern hemisphere of earth.  Even now a tiny galaxy is colliding with our galaxy.  We can penetrate to the center of our own galaxy in infrared light, but not visible light from our location 26,000 light years away.

* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.  They may be different for your location.

Addendum

The Milky Way 360 degrees - Wikipedia

This is a mosaic of photographs showing the Milky Way as seen from the earth.  The summer Milky Way we see is from just right of center to the left edge.