Last month, after being
dropped off by a helicopter at a
high mountain peak in the
Alps near the
Swiss
Italian border,
an adventurous astrophotographer expected two arches of
our Milky Way galaxy to be
visible during the night.

These were the inner arch looking in
toward the center of our galaxy on the left,
visible just before sunrise, and the
outer arch on the
right visible just after sunset.

But there were three arches.

The surprised
astrophotographer soon realized that the sky was
so dark that an
entire arc of faint
zodiacal light was also noticeable --
sunlight scattered by inner
Solar System dust.

And it artfully connected the two Milky Way arches!

The next morning a helicopter picked the astrophotographer back up,
and after 40 hours of processing and combining that night's images, the
featured triple-arch 360-degree panorama resulted.