Expert: Courtney Seligman - 1/7/2009

Question
Do you know of any websites that show a picture/animation of the  milky way galaxy with the constellations.  I want to see where these stars/constellations are positioned in relation to the galaxy; and earth.

Answer
If you mean, where are the constellations in the sky, relative to the Milky Way, then there are many books and websites which show the relative positions of the stars and constellations, and where they are relative to the Milky Way.

But if you mean, where are they in space, within the structure which we call our Galaxy, you should imagine our Galaxy as a large, rotating disk, as shown in pictures such as those on my website, at http://cseligman.com/text/galaxies/milkyway.htm The second picture on that page shows an artist's conception of our Galaxy, as seen from "above", with a yellow dot (added by me) to show the location of our Solar System.

In that picture, every star that you can see in the night-time sky without binoculars or a telescope lies within the same dot used to show our location. With binoculars or telescopes, you can see out into space a few percent of the size of the Milky Way, but naked-eye observations only reveal stars so close to us that their distances are insignificant in comparison with the size of the Galaxy. As a result, if we and all the stars we can see without optical aid were to simply disappear, all that an observer outside our Galaxy might notice is that a few of the stars in the dot were no longer there; and in reality, they probably wouldn't notice any difference, at all.

Courtney Seligman
Professor of Astronomy
Long Beach City College

P.S. Please forgive the lateness of this reply. I was just about to post an answer, a few hours ago, when I temporarily lost my Internet connection, and I just noticed that it had been restored a few minutes ago.