At moonrise, Mount Rainier in Washington is mirrored at night in the Reflection Lakes, with the stars of the Milky Way rising behind the volcano. The Reflection Lakes are becoming increasingly shallow and smaller as aquatic vegetation takes root and mud accumulates on the lake bed. The Puyallup Tribe of Native Americans called this mountain Tahoma or Tacoma, meaning the mother of all waters.
With the Milky Way’s starry sky directly behind the mountain, it appears as though it is being exhaled from the volcano’s summit. The famous W-shaped Cassiopeia constellation stands out brightly, together with the double star clusters NGC 869 and NGC 884, also called h and χ Persei, in the upper right of the summit. Both star clusters contain hundreds of stars and are part of the Perseus spiral arm of our galaxy at a distance of 7,000 light-years. The elongated bright object to the right above the forest is our nearest neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, M31. Its disk is twice as wide as our Milky Way and lies 2.2 million light-years away from Earth. The Cygnus constellation with its brightest star, Deneb, is visible at the top of the image, together with the reddish North America Nebula, NGC 7000, consisting of ionized hydrogen.
