So the main band going across the sky in the pic is our own galaxy, the Milky Way. It’s made up of a bunch of stars, gas, and dust.
To the naked eye under dark skies you can see some of the large structures in it, but it will just look grey (hence the ‘milky’ name). Our retinas suck at detecting color in low light situations (the color sensing cone cells need a lot of light), so even when looking through large telescopes pretty much every nebula and galaxy just looks gray.
The one exception to this is the Orion Nebula, which is one of the brightest deep sky objects. IMO It’s very slightly green looking (compared to pink in cameras] since of the cone cells in our eyes, green is most sensitive
![African Night [3840x2160]](https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/6a126a42-3f72-4068-aeb0-254e35a019d5.jpeg){kind=link}
So the main band going across the sky in the pic is our own galaxy, the Milky Way. It’s made up of a bunch of stars, gas, and dust.
To the naked eye under dark skies you can see some of the large structures in it, but it will just look grey (hence the ‘milky’ name). Our retinas suck at detecting color in low light situations (the color sensing cone cells need a lot of light), so even when looking through large telescopes pretty much every nebula and galaxy just looks gray.
The one exception to this is the Orion Nebula, which is one of the brightest deep sky objects. IMO It’s very slightly green looking (compared to pink in cameras] since of the cone cells in our eyes, green is most sensitive