Simple facts
What it is: the bright band of the Milky Way and the faint glow of the zodiac light
Location: Cerro Tololo, Inter-American Observatory, Chile
When shared: August 6, 2025
This stunning image from Astropotographer Petr Horálek captures two of the most illustrious sights of the night sky in one. This is the elusive “Zodiacal light” of the Milky Way. Despite appearing side by side with each other, these two stripes of light were no more different in origin and composition.
Astronomers have built some of the best telescopes of mankind in the Southern Hemisphere and have a better view of the bright core of the Milky Way, densely packed with stars and nebulae. Its core passes through constellations including Scorpius, Sagittarius and Ophiuchus.
The image was taken at the Celotoro-Torroro Observatory (CTIO) at an altitude of 7,200 feet (2,200 meters) in the Chilean Desert in the desert of southern Atacama. At this height, beyond the dense and warmest parts of the Earth’s atmosphere, an incredibly clear, dark sky is the norm, allowing observers to see not only the bright bands of the Milky Way, but the less obvious ones that exist in the solar system.
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The light of the constellations, the biggest visible solar system phenomenon in the night sky, is the faint, diffuse glow of the night sky that casual observers often overlook. It consists of sunlight reflecting dust from our universe neighbours, possibly from asteroids, comets and leftovers from planetary layers. In 2020, the paper also claimed that zodiac light could be made from dust blown away from Mars. In any case, the shine of the solar system is an arrest warrant, but it’s difficult to see.
The light of the zodiac is the brightest around the equinox and appears along the zodiac – the apparent path through the sky – as a triangular beam of light on the horizon hours before sunrise or hours after sunset. The timing led to being called either “fake dawn” or “fake twilight”, but its name comes from the fact that it appears to be the 13 constellations that make up the constellations.
The epic image of Horálek was filmed in 2022 when he was audiovisual ambassador for Noirlab, who runs CTIO. The photos show the US Navy Observatory Deep Southeres Scope, the DIMM1 Seeing Monitor, the Chilean Automatic Supernova Search Dome, the UBC South Observatory and the 1.0-meter planetary defense telescope.
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