Drakkith said:
The answer is in the second picture in your reference. The 'Angle between celestial north and galactic north' is the angle between the Earth's axis and the line pointing from the Sun to the galactic center, and is 62.87 degrees, which means the plane is pointing more towards the core than away.
It is the second picture, agreed. But. The angle you're talking about is in a plane roughly parallel to the Sun-Galactic Centre direction. That is, the right ascension of the Galactic North is approx 13h, close to the direction of the autumnal equinox (to the right of the picture). In the picture it represents more the general slant of the plane of the ecliptic than that of the equatorial plane.
AutodiJack said:
Diagram i made to help illustrate what I mean:
As was said, the second is right. However you need to fix the labels. The Earth in that picture revolves around the Sun in the anti-clockwise direction, both by convention and by the depicted orientation w/r to the galaxy. So what follows the winter solstice should be the vernal (spring) equinox, not autumnal. Unless it's meant to represent the direction towards the equinox (but then there would be more to fix elsewhere), and not the time of the year.
Incidentally, the first picture would have Summer when it's labelled Winter, as it's the inclination of the equatorial plane that determines the seasons.
Back to the directions. You can find the equatorial coordinates of the major points of the galactic coordinate system on Wikipedia. The Galactic Centre is towards approx. RA 17h 45m, dec -29 deg. In both cases roughly 5 degrees of arc from the direction towards the Sun during the Winter solstice. That's close enough to assume it's the same direction for our purposes.
So as you look at the second picture, with the Earth at the Winter solstice point, towards the Sun, the declination value tells you how far below ('cause it's negative) the Earth's equatorial plane you'll see the centre of the Galaxy. Since you're looking
below, the plane of the equator has to be tilted
up - as depicted in the 2nd one.