Explore the Milky Way with your binoculars. Many members of our home galaxy may be seen with binoculars. Starting with star clusters near to Earth is a nice place to start. They span a bigger region of the sky than other, more distant clusters, which are normally seen with a telescope. The constellation Orion is easy to find with a map or computer program. It's one of the constellations that can be seen from everywhere in the world at least once. The Orion Nebula is a cloud of gas and dust many light-years across located within Orion's sword shape belt. It can only be seen with a telescope because it is so far away: 500 light-years from Earth. The constellation Cygnus is another easy one to find on a map or computer screen. It has a lot of interesting objects to look at with a telescope. The Swan is the brightest object within Cygnus and can be seen with the naked eye as a faint, white dot in the nighttime sky. With a small telescope you can see that it's an elliptical galaxy more than 100 million light-years away from Earth. Cancer is the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and contains a large number of stars cluster. But all you can see with the unaided eye is its central bulge made up of old stars. A telescope will make fine details such as individual stars visible. This image was taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.