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Space Pictures From Near and Far
Buran writes: "The BBC News has a fine story about the how our galaxy looks from the outside according to the 2-Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS). The article describes the shape of our galaxy (a barred spiral; all those books showing concept paintings of a regular spiral galaxy will be out of date now) and how the survey was done (near-infrared measurements of 500 million carbon stars). For the first time, we can see the center of our own Milky Way. All our worldly troubles seem so small..." That takes care of the big picture; Chris McKinstry has submitted news of much closer but just as exciting shots of Saturn -- read below for more on those.
mindpixel writes: "I was very excited when I saw this amazing shot of Saturn come up on the control room monitors of the VLT in November, and I'm even more excited that as of today the image is finally public. It is possibly the sharpest view of Saturn's ring system ever achieved from a ground-based observatory. All of us here at the observatory are quite proud of it, especially the NAOS-CONICA team."
Had the title been simply "Pictures From Near And Far", nobody would read it. But, the addition of "Space" makes it infinitely more attractive.
Try it. Space Ice Cream. Yum! Ice Cream. Boring. Space Frisbee! Exciting! Frisbee. Dull, lifeless. Space Herpes! Oh, wait...
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
It suffices to travel toward the galactic north for 50,000 light-years or so and snap a picture. Gee, why all the effort?
For sale: One novelty T-shirt, displaying the (formerly correct) image of the Milky Way, and the words "You Are Here" with arrow. Lightly used. Almost clean.
Sorry to say it, but that picture of Saturn is just too perfect, it looks like a cheap computer rendition. Can we go back to the less sophisticated, grainy pictures? They were more exciting and seemed more "real".
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, And things seem hard or tough, [clunk] And people are stupid, obnoxious, or daft, And you feel that you've had quite enough, [boom]
[singing] Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour, That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned, A sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see Are moving at a million miles a day In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour, Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars. It's a hundred thousand light years side to side. It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick, But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide. We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point. We go 'round every two hundred million years, And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe. [boom] [slurp]
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding In all of the directions it can whizz As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know, Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is. So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, How amazingly unlikely is your birth, And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
I'm sure it's been posted before, but I don't have the patience to look for it.
MMMMMM Milky Way. That is the first thing that I thought of when I read the article. I could sure go in for a candy bar.
And (okay now I'm getting deep) that's the problem with getting funding for space probes. My stomach is a lot more important to me than Uranus (or Pluto). Even if it costs next to nothing, I don't want to spend money on a probe when I could be spending money on making my life nicer.
Knowledge is all well in good, but there's no nugguty center.
Sweat
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!