July 6, 2026
Your birthday coincides with the eternal dance of celestial bodies — planets tracing their ancient orbits, moons rising and setting, comets...
Dueling Bands over the Atacama Desert
Birthday · July 6, 2026
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APOD published July 6, 2026. Credit: Julien Looten. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
What are these two bands in the sky? The more commonly seen band is on the left and is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun orbits in the disk of this spiral galaxy so that from inside, it appears as a band of comparable brightness all the way around the sky. The less commonly seen band, on the right, is zodiacal light -- sunlight reflected from dust orbiting the Sun in our Solar System. Zodiacal light is brightest near the Sun and so is best seen just before sunrise or just after sunset. On some evenings, this ribbon of zodiacal light can appear quite prominent. It was discovered only in this century that zodiacal dust was mostly expelled by comets that have passed near Jupiter. The featured image was captured about a year ago from the Atacama Desert in Chile.
Image credit: Julien Looten