Explanation:
If you could
turn off the atmosphere's ability to scatter
overwhelming sunlight, today's daytime sky might look something
like this ... with the Sun surrounded by the stars of the
constellations Taurus and Gemini.
Of course, today is
the Solstice.
Traveling along the
ecliptic plane,
the Sun is at its northernmost
position in planet Earth's sky, marking the
astronomical beginning
of summer in the north.
Accurate for the exact time of today's Solstice,
this
composite image also shows the Sun at the proper scale
(about the angular
size of the Full Moon).
Open star cluster M35 is to the Sun's left,
and the other two bright stars in view are
Mu and Eta Geminorum.
Digitally superimposed on a nighttime image of the stars, the Sun
itself is a composite of a picture taken through a solar filter and a series
of images of the solar corona recorded during the
solar eclipse of
February 26, 1998 by Andreas Gada.
