Largest Ever Digital Survey of the Milky Way Released

Several readers have written to tell us that an international team of over fifty astronomers from around the globe have created the largest ever digital survey of the Milky Way. IPHAS (INT/WFC Photometric H-alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane) is an image survey designed to show large-scale structure within our galaxy. IPHAS data is being released by utilizing technology from the UK government funded open source project Astrogrid. Some of the images are quite spectacular.

Comments

Lovely

[fyngyrz]

...and while the astronomers fiddle with gear you and I can only dream of having access to, take your camera and a tripod outside, and with no more than a portrait lens, you can take shots like these.

Click on the thumbnails for descriptions of the subject matter and the equipment and settings used.

The night sky is beautiful at every scale.

Re:Lovely

[syousef]

...and while the astronomers fiddle with gear you and I can only dream of having access to, take your camera and a tripod outside, and with no more than a portrait lens, you can take shots like these.

Disclaimer: I have a masters in Astronomy but I've never worked in the field. I did the degree "for fun", because I never got the opportunity to study in highschool, and because I wanted to know how we know what we know about the universe. I'm very much an amateur in every respect.

Defintely worth fiddling with camera gear, but at some point if you're taking your own shots you're going to want to use a telescope. Starting with binoculars is definitely the best way. Moving to a dobsonian for viewing (but terrible for photography) is a good next step. (Don't buy anything with a small aperture unless all you're interested in is moon and planets). Next good step would be a Newtonian on EQ mount or SCT. It gets very expensive very quickly. I pretty much gave up on astrophotography. (I live in a large city and when I do get away far enough, I'm usually exhausted from the drive, and there are other priorities (family). Also a 10" scope takes up a hell of a lot of room even in a station wagon).

An alternative to the above is to get hold of sky survey data that's already available and captured by the pro images. There's a lot out there that gets released usually after a year (to give the professional scientists time to work with it). Hubble data, Chandra X-Ray data, SOHO images. It's not all pretty composite colour pictures - you often have to learn to manipulate the images with image software or with more complex data there's specialized software that's not always for the faint of heart (often free, often Linux based). "Amateurs" have done amazing things with some of the images and data. In astronomy there is an "image" (FITS) file format that is actually more than just a simple JPEG etc. You have a background in photography so while it's not strictly RAW data in the sense that it's not coming straight off a sensor, you can think of this format as containing more information the way RAW contains more than JPEG (stuff like calibration information). More information here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITS
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/fits.html

Please understand I'm not trying to discourage you from backyard astronomy. I just thought you might be interested in this too. These days the guys that take the images/capture data and the guys that analyse them are not always the same. ie. you often have technicians that specialise in running the machines.

Here are some links for you:

FITS data from lots of missions/instruments
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/archive.html

Digitized Sky Survey
http://archive.eso.org/dss/dss
http://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/dss_form

Hubble
http://hubblesite.org/

SOHO
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/

Chandra
http://chandra.harvard.edu/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/resources/

If you want more detail and are prepared to try to work out science speak, you can get access to draft papers on:
http://arxiv.org/
Look under astrophysics

I don't have time to go into any more. Hope you're interested.

Survey results

[Kohath]

52% of stars surveyed said they were in favor of equality for dark matter
41% were opposed
7% had no opinion

Margin of error 2.7%

Why do some so love staring into space?

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

I am always amazed at the large-scale structures of the universe. Especially the way that these structures are almost always analogous to physical phenomenon on earth (perhaps no surprise or coincidence if you adhere to the anthropic principle ;)

I was showing my wife the computer-generated 3D maps of the uneven, filamentous distribution of galaxies in the known universe and she commented on how it reminded her of the fingers and tendrils of water being thrown from a bucket - but thrown out in all directions. I suddenly saw gravity as a sort of surface tension, trying to bring everything back together into a nice, neutral sphere. I also suddenly saw the dark energy as the momentum of the thrower and the dark energy as the buffeted air through which the splash disperses.

It's amazing how an analogy can take something so intangiable and make it immediately accessable. I feel, however, that sometimes a simple analogy can have a negative effect as well.

Without a true appreciation of the reality of astronomical images, comparisons to clouds and swirling water can diminish the wonder.

For me, in this image I see a stunning display of incomprehensible size and volume. I see the very heart and soul of our universe laid bare; the very stuff from which everything is made - amazing!

But for someone more lay in the ways of science and astronomy (and less enthused) this simply looks like a puff of smoke.

How is it that some of us wonder and wander and some of us do not?

Re:Wow....

[Liquidrage]

Can you post a link to your desktop so we can all see the image.

I really hate when /. thinks it's OK to link to some large image file on some little server somewhere.