1610 !
Galileo Galilei first saw a band of light into individual stars with his telescope. I only can imagine now how joyful that moment was for him. After that, for up to 300 years we believed that milky way contains all the stars in the universe. yes, 300 years! then following 1920 Edwin Hubble (NASA named the world's first large, space-based optical telescope after his name) showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies. The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with a diameter between 100,000 and 180,000 light-years. The Milky Way is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars.There are probably at least 100 billion planets in the Milky Way. The Solar System is located on the disk and we live there!
I knew up to this before going to the place with the great team of Sky Watchers Association of North Bengal (A Nasa afterschool). The place from where we were shooting was a village located somewhere in the middle of Bangladesh and India. Still today that place does not have any proper country identification. and it is located near about 4 hours away from Bagdogra Airport.
So I spend the entire night on the field with our team. But at the beginning, we shot the milky way. It is a subject which you can not watch properly with the naked eye (most of the time).
At near about 4 AM when I was standing at one portion of the field from where I can only see that my friends and the team were working on the portion. I was going through the photos that I took that night and I was really surprised to see the outcome of milky way suddenly I thought, after Galileo Galilei, it's been near 400 years today. And I feel that somehow we are just carrying the history with us, whenever I look around I see the human history. And somehow I felt that my eyes got moist but I felt a real happy. This picture will always keep me remind that, how small we are. And always bring the question to me, where we actually stand in the whole universe.