A 200 degree panorama of the arch of the northern Milky Way rising over the Badlands landscape of Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, Canada. Adding to the sky colours are bands of green oxygen airglow, especially at centre to the east, and perhaps yellow sodium airglow at right. At left to the north the horizon is tinted pink from a faint arc of aurora borealis. The mass of stars toward the galactic centre at right in Sagittarius and Scorpius also glow with a combined yellow light, in part due to absorption of shorter wavelengths of starlight by interstellar dust in the spiral arms of the Galaxy. It is that obscuring dust that creates the dark regions along the Milky Way, splitting the Milky Way starting in Cygnus at top and extending at right down into Serpens. The stars also have their own colours, such as blue Vega at top and yellow Arcturus at upper right. Yellow Antares in Scorpius shines above the hoodoo at lower right. The most striking sky colours are the red and magenta from glowing hydrogen gas in star-forming nebulas along the MilkyWay and toward the galactic core rising at right. The most obvious H-alpha feature is the large round nebula at right, Sharpless 2-27 surrounding the star Zeta Ophiuchi above Scorpius. The red nebulas in the Milky Way to the left of Sh2-27 are from Messier objects and other faint nebulas in Sagittarius and Serpens. At the top of the arch is the constellation of Cygnus, filled with red emission nebulas, the largest and brightest being the North America Nebula near the star Deneb. To the left farther along the Milky Way in the northeast are numerous nebulas in Cepheus, Cassiopeia and Perseus, most in the next spiral arm farther out from us. Much farther away, is the Andromeda Galaxy just rising at left.
