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Space Pictures From Near and Far

Posted by timothy on from the mostly-empty dept.

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the shape of our galaxy (a barred spiral; all those books showing concept paintings of a regular spiral galaxy will be out of date now) and how the survey was done (near-infrared measurements of 500 million carbon stars).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."

19 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. The title of this article proves my theory. by Wakko+Warner · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?"
    1. Re:The title of this article proves my theory. by cburley · · Score: 5, Funny
      Try it. Space Ice Cream. Yum! Ice Cream.

      That's a poor example, because, in space, no-one can hear ice cream.

      ;-)

      --
      Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
    2. Re:The title of this article proves my theory. by daeley · · Score: 4, Funny

      The worst is when you get space herpes around Uranus.

      (sorry, couldn't resist)

      [ducking]

      --
      I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
    3. Re:The title of this article proves my theory. by delcielo · · Score: 3, Funny

      First it was the restaurant at the end of the universe, now it's the bar at the center of the galaxy.

      Urban sprawl is getting ridiculous.

      --
      Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
  2. Great pictures! by FrostedWheat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I can't wait until Cassini gets within range of Saturn, it is definitly one of the most amazing things in the sky. Unfornatually it's largly been ignored by many high-power telescopes and space probes.

    What NASA/ESA and all the other agencies in the world need to do is send out a swam of probes to *every* planet - a little science is better than no science!

    1. Re:Great pictures! by FrostedWheat · · Score: 4, Interesting

      True, but the various space agencies could spread the cost like they did with the International Space Station. I doubt if any one single country would/could have done that.

      USA/Russia could prove valuable help with there long experience in space. Europe could provide the launch vehicle. There are many other countries that could provide valuable help with the design and building of the actual probes. Help make them smaller and tougher than before.

      Missions like Cassini/Galelio are very expensive, but they are designed to stay in orbit for years. Look how much great data the Voyagers returned on there quick passes of each planet.

      Imagine the images Galelio could have given us if it had been in orbit when the string of comets hit! With small, replacable, probes constantly in orbit of the various planets we'd be much better placed to observe these extremly rare events. Then they send in the big missions, when they know it's worth it.

    2. Re:Great pictures! by Witchblade · · Score: 5, Interesting
      What NASA/ESA and all the other agencies in the world need to do is send out a swam of probes to *every* planet - a little science is better than no science!

      Yes, and I'm sure they'd love to do it. The problem, as always, is funding. In the early days of the Space Race Soviet and American taxpayers gladly ponied up the cash for spaceprobes, just for the bragging rights to be 'first'. After that was accomplished we've entered phase 2: probes can only get funding by exploiting the 'search for possible life' angle. We're throwing probe after probe at Mars (and consequently billions and billions of dollars) yet we haven't even seen Pluto.

      Quick and dirty Pluto flybys keep getting canceled almost as soon as any funding is approved, even though most of us working in the space sciences would gladly relocate funding from projects we're involved in just to get something simple like Pluto-Kuiper Express of the ground.

      The public won't have it, though. Now to explain why we should send a 'swarm' of spacecraft to places they've never heard of. We astronomers have the advantage of the huge amount of unknown in searching for planets. We can, in mostly good conscience, play the Lifecard in proposals to study any stellar phenomena. Geologists are stuck with just two at his point: Mars and Europa.

      Just think of all we don't know about our own moon. Where is the swarm of really cost-effective probes we could be sending there? The only time anyone took notice was when a military craft found very shaky evidence for a possible tiny bit of water in a shadow of a small crater near the pole. The only return visits under any serious consideration are desgined soley to test that finding.

      If any exobiologists are reading, all you need to do is come up with a convincing argument for micro-organism in Saturn's atmosphere and I have the suspicion that Slashdot readers will get all the pretty ring pictures their hearts' could desire. ;)

    3. Re:Great pictures! by IronChef · · Score: 3, Insightful


      It's a neat idea but "micropayments" are impossible/impractical with today's financial system. If there was an easy way to charge $0.001 for clicking on a link, it would have already taken the web by storm.

      Too bad, it WOULD be nice for a lot of things, but we're going to have to wait.

  3. Wait... by xfs · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Isn't micron symbolized by a "" ?
    It would be 2ASS then... looks like something someone would say in an AOL chat room...
    please flame me if I'm wrong.

  4. For sale cheap: by 3prong · · Score: 5, Funny


    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.

  5. Billions and billions... by Teancom · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I jumped on the space bandwagon late, and it's really only been recently that I've developed an interest at all. So I'm in a unique position of learning basic facts that others take for granted, at an age where I can appreciate the grandeur. For instance, the fact that there are truly *billions and billions* of stars *just in our galaxy*. That had me reeling for a couple of days... I don't want to ramble, but *man* is space cool. And space icecream is cool, too, I guess :-)

    1. Re:Billions and billions... by dragons_flight · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I too had a recent revelation.

      Given the local density of the universe, there should be around 100 star systems within 20 lightyears of the Earth. In fact, we've already identified 76 such star systems. For those that are interested this site lists the closest 26 stars (as opposed to star systems, which might be binary, trinary, etc.). There is also a more technical listing of the 100 closest known star systems (out to 24 lightyears).

      Expanding away geometrically there would be about 1,700 star systems within 50 lightyears, and 13,000 within 100 lightyears. Fact of the matter is we don't even know which stars most of these are, since the majority of stars are relatively small and small stars rarely have their distance calculated.

      If we ever do figure out how to get up close to light speed, then there is plenty of real estate to explore. Hell, if it turns out that life really is quite common, then maybe little green men actually can afford to come visit us.

  6. newest Galactic Center release, in color by ghostlibrary · · Score: 4, Interesting

    At the AAS meeting a few weeks ago, a Chandra (X-Ray observatory) team produced this stunning mosiac of the Galactic Center.
    It's amazing. Also, apparently the supposed massive black hole in our galaxy's center is 'off', so there's not a lot of emission from it, instead we see remnants of earlier activity (such as Sagittarius A).

    --
    A.
    1. Re:newest Galactic Center release, in color by ghostlibrary · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I know your post was funny (+1) and rhetorical (+1), but I thought I'd answer it anyway because, hey, I'm pedantic (-1).

      Central black holes only are bright if they are sucking in matter. When they suck in matter and generate radiation, the radiation tends to blow away the surrounding gas a bit. Also, just sucking in the matter of course depletes the region.

      So after a bit, the space around the central black hole gets kinda sparse and there's not much for it it eat, so things cool down. This lets the gas further out get dragged in a bit (since there's not as much radiation blowing it away) and eventually enough accumulates that the emission from the black hole increases again.

      A lot of astrophysical stuff has cycles of basically 'eat and blow, thus clearing out the area, then sit there empty until more food gets drawn to you by your superior mass'.

      If you imagine a fat friend with a PS2 who requires chips and soda, you get the picture-- people get sucked in by the cool PS2 games but when the chips are gone and the farting has cleared out the area, he sits there alone until things have time to settle and friends begin to get drawn back to the PS2 again. [Yeah, I know, I'm now a Contendor for Worst Analogy of 2002].

      --
      A.
  7. Re:Saturn too perfect by Graymalkin · · Score: 4, Informative

    In actuality it IS a cheap computer rendition. The Saturn image was done in the H and K bands (both in the infrared region) which people can't see. The sensors store an 8-bit sample for each pixel. If you looked at a rasterized image from one of these sensors it would just be an 8-bit greyscale image. These are rather boring to look at so the astonomers apply these grayscale images to colour channels of an RGB image. SO what they are doing is assigning a band you can't normally see (infrared) to bands you can see so you're impressed. This leads to confusion though because the final images don't LOOK anything like they would through a normal telescope. Saturn for example, the rings are super bright and crappy looking. This is because they are formed of ice crystals and dust which relfects infrared radiation pretty well. The original greyscale raster would look just as bright but the ring would be a really light shade pretty close to white in both the H and K bands. Older pictures of Saturn have usually been visual spectrum pictures so they look pretty natural. Cheaper computers have led to many a misleading space photograph.

    --
    I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
  8. astronomy and computing... by supernova87a · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Take a look at that picture of the center of the galaxy again -- one of the biggest challenges to astronomy is how to catalogue every single object visible and create a rapidly searchable database. And that picture is not even 10% of the sky, in only one band! Astronomers are having to come up with new ways of loading, structuring, and searching multi-TB datasets to get incredible science out of the flood of data. The future of astronomy is in these multi-TB databases, in multiple wavelengths, which create the "National Virtual Observatory".

    If you want to understand the science that these databases would make possible, imagine if your business had a searchable database of the entire population of the world, with parameters like age, height, weight, income, address, phone number, spending habits, and more, for every single person.

    Have a look at this link for what some scientists think a virtual observatory will be capable of!

  9. Not 'first time' we see center of galaxy. by Michael+Woodhams · · Score: 3, Informative

    As is so often the case in journalism, this claim is wildly overselling things (and is not made in the BBC article.) I was using IRAS (infrared astronomy satellite) and various earthbound surveys (including the much earlier TMSS two micron all sky survey) around 1990, and have an IRAS poster from that era at home showing our galaxy (including the core.) Similarly, we have known for over a decade that our galaxy is a barred spiral.

    Is this a case of the more overblown your submission, the more likely slashdot is to carry the story?

    I'm not knocking the 2MASS survey - high quality all sky surveys like this lead to huge amounts of high quality science.

    --
    Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
  10. To Those in the Know by Alpha+State · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why isn't there a big blind spot on the opposite side of the calactic center? Can the MASS see through the center, or are they just filling in what they assume is there?

    Furthermore, can we see objects farther away on the opposite side of the galactic center? If not, how big is the blind spot?

  11. They got movies too by Alien54 · · Score: 4, Informative
    quick time format, various sizes (5.8mb, 9.5mb, 41mb)

    http://www.ipac.caltech.edu/2mass/gallery/gc_movie .html

    it's of the galactic center

    pretty cool

    --
    "It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"