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Spitzer's 5-Gigapixel Milky Way
James Harold writes "Today NASA unveiled a new infrared mosaic of our galaxy. The result of over 800,000 individual images collected by the Spitzer Space Telescope, it is the largest, highest-resolution, and most sensitive infrared picture ever taken of the Milky Way (and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future). Because Spitzer sees in infrared, it penetrates much farther into the galaxy, revealing previously hidden star clusters, star-forming regions, shocked gases, glowing 'bubbles' and more. The complete mosaic is about 400,000 by 13,000 pixels, and a 180' printed version is being shown at the American Astronomical Society meeting in St. Louis. A zoomable, annotated version of two different variants on the image (as well as some additional information on the science) is available at Alien Earths, a NASA- and NSF-supported education site." The Spitzer survey is already causing a stir potentially bigger than that raised when Pluto was deemed not a planet: two minor spiral arms of the Milky Way may be demoted.
Wow they took a 400,000 by 13,000 pixel image and compressed it to a 200x200 jpeg to wow us net folks, stellar.
The average lay person is not going to care about the status of spiral arms in the galaxy. Everybody learned that Pluto was a planet in grade school. That fact gives the average person a stake in its status. When you ask about a spiral arm, you'll hear "huh?".
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
It was saying "Eliot!"
Seriously though, I just came for the Spitzer jokes.
If this information is owned by the government, it should be free to the citizens, and hence free to google sky, or the other alternatives. Why doesn't this immediately go that direction?
I understand Google Earth/etc. being bound by paying terrestrial satellite owners for photos, but I would think NASA could get better public support if they were more available in the sky.
.. I thought this was some new escort agency the former NY governor took some photos off
He is a dog - sorry I could not resist it..
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
http://www.alienearths.org/glimpse/glimpse.php and launching the viewer will bring up the zoomable image mentioned
The image is here. Yet again great editing.
Anyone got a torrent?
But, the images (the huge ones) are right there, here is the direct link to the huge images http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-11/ssc2008-11a.shtml
Spitzer
James Harold writes "Today NASA unveiled a new infrared mosaic. The result of over 800,000 individual images collected by Spitzer, it is the largest, highest-resolution, and most sensitive infrared picture ever taken (and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future). Because Spitzer sees in infrared, it penetrates much farther, revealing previously hidden regions, shocked gases, glowing 'bubbles' and more. The complete mosaic is about 400,000 by 13,000 pixels, and a 180' printed version is being shown at the a meeting in St. Louis. A zoomable, annotated version of two different variants on the image (as well as some additional information on the science) is available at Alien Earths, a NASA- and NSF-supported education site." Spitzer is already causing a stir potentially bigger than Pluto.
And thats just with deletes :)
Okay, I realize the tag says !eliot, but when the summary says: Spitzer, penetrates, revealed, and shocked, it makes me think that Slashdot is trying to embed secret messages in TFS.
Is that a Chevr olet sponsored image ?
Reread the summary, but this time...think Eliot Spitzer and his lady of the night, Ashley Dupre... or porn...
You were really planning to click on a link pointing to a 20 gigabyte image? Then what?
i've had just about enough of your vassar bashing.
I thought I was reading the New York Post for a moment.
well they should've shot it in low iso, those damn ccd noise is unbearable
And here I was thinking I was gonna see hi-res pictures of Eliot's whore with his jizz on it...
I found it...interesting that the first commenter in the article about the two arms being demoted took a single comment about astronomy ("Trying to create a picture of the Milky Way is about 40% hard science and 60% imagination") and tried to spin it into a debate on "Intelligent Design."
Maybe interesting isn't the word I'm looking for.
You know you're going to have trouble viewing when downloading a JPEG actually takes a noticeable ammount of time over broadband. IE, MSPaint, Firefox, and a trusty little shareware image editor I use--they all choked on the first hi-res image. The surprise winner? The Windows Picture and Fax viewer that comes with XP. I was even able to zoom in several times, but it too eventually choked.
The failure of Firefox is a bit of a disappointment here. The Picture and Fax win is surprising since other MS apps identified the image as being in an "unsupported format". The shareware app thought it was "damaged". This is probably just an effort on the part of those apps to protect themselves from what's usualy a nonsensical dimension.
Well, that's the Windows XP side of this. How are people viewing these images on other OSs? Are you able to view it with anything that "just comes with the OS", or are you having to go out of your way?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Epic Freakin' Wallpaper. I wish I had a printer that could do that size for my walls.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Great, now all i have to do is dl the hi-res images so i can print them out and line my office walls with them. When my boss asks me to take it down, I'll reply with "I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
How could they be less than 18 years old?
Or, for the baseball fans.... Are they going to send those arms back to the rookie league?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
So... umm... imagination! Just use your imagination, everyone!
-Aegis Runestone-
And to think that only a century ago, we were debating whether ours was the only "island universe". It's amazing to think what progress we've made in only a couple lifetimes.
"two minor spiral arms of the Milky Way may be demoted."
I suspected something like this might happen, I just didn't dream that they'd go so far.
I mean, you have to be just a little suspicious about whether all star-forming arms are on an equal footing when you look at the names. There's Perseus and Sagittarius. Then we get to Scutum-Centaurus, and you have to wonder if the astronomers needed a leg up in the imagination department. And then all doubt vanishes when we get to the fourth arm...Norma. Yes, Norma. Like the girl who couldn't wait to get old enough to disown her parents, legally change her name to Chantal and get a job at the brass-pole ballet.
You just had to know they were having their doubts about arm number 4.
On a more positive note, the same bunch of guys who just slammed Scutum-Centaurus and, um, "Norma", are also telling us that they "obtained detailed information about our galaxy's bar, and found that it extends farther out from the centre of the galaxy than previously thought".
A bar that's closer to the house than you thought can't be a bad thing. Especially when you need to walk home.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Not seeing all 4 arms in infrared light is not new. In fact this has been known for a long time and it just means that those stellar arms are not density waves in the stellar disk. However, they are seen in the distribution of molecular clouds. Basically this means that the Milky Way has two overlapping spiral pattern: a stronger 2-armed mode which is in stars and gas, and another 4-armed mode which is only seen in gas. The 4-arm mode is weaker (as expected from theory) and extends over a smaller radius range. So not all studies will find 4 arms. In the optical, that is seen by eye from the distance, our Galaxy would look 4-armed, because those weaker arms are still hosts of star formation. But in infrared, many galaxies look different, because in this waveband we see mostly the older stellar population.
I hope you got a look at the Spitzer view of Andromeda. Check it out:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051017070302.htm
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I read that as Gov. Spitzer's 5-Gigapixel Milky Way.
And all based on essentially two-dimensional observation. It's like having your neck immediately permanently clamped to a chair the moment you're born, and then trying to figure out the three-dimensional size, shape and arrangement of the objects all around you, without ever being able to get up and walk towards them, pick them up, look at them from another angle, and so forth. Very much like Plato's people of the cave, I think, trying to deduce the nature of real objects solely from the shadows they cast on the wall.
I'd still like to know how they get absolute distance measurements from IR observation inside the galaxy. No red shift, no absolute/relative luminosity relationships like you have with stars. How is it done?
I live in St. Louis and I'd like to take my kids to the convention center to see this thing. Is it somewhere that it can be viewed by the public, or do they expect full admission prices for three kids under 10?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
How dare we observe everything so thoughtlessly? I mean, will someone please think of all the cats in the galaxy who still enjoy their happy unobserved lives (or not)?
Why is the universe shaped like a chevy emblem in the center? Why are we so blind, our universe is the chrome coating on a chevy symbol... really makes you think.
http://carpictures.carjunky.com/albums/album04/chevy_emblem.sized.jpg
My uncle worked at Ball Aerospace in Boulder where Spitzer was built. He took me on a tour of the place and I got to see Spitzer while it was still in a few pieces. The solid beryllium mirror was a beautiful thing.
Could someone explain how they 'build' the images that depict the Milkyway, as seen from OUTSIDE the Milkyway, from these images? Do they actually have parralax measurements for each star, or do they use some frequency-shifts? And how did they do this aprox. 20 years ago, when they already had relativly exact images of the Milkyway, but technology was way more inferior?
Hey... I can see my house from there...
I guess they were shocked by seeing the Giant Goatse black hole at the center of the galaxy.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I thought this article was about photos on Eliot Spitzer's digital camera...
Looks like a good test for image editing programs. How they play with thing? Anyone tested it?
Google, MicroSoft and others are generalizing their map software to pan and zoom through huge astronomical databases such as this. The first two are partnering the massive telescope surveys to manage the petabytes of data to be acquired.
I was showing my gf this site. I showed her one, told her it was pink. She said"Of course. all nebulae are pink"
"Set Course for the nebulae" I started zooming in. "But captain, our shields will be useless!" She almost peed herself.
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. 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 have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
Hello Slashdotsters,
I'm one of the lucky admins who had the responsibility of posting these GLIMPSE Milky Way images. This was the single largest release Spitzer has had to date.
For those people that are having problems downloading the images, keep in mind some of them are HUGE.
If all you wan is a casual look click on the "Screen-Resolution (900x492): JPEG".
If you want to see the entire poster there are four links in the orange box in different resolutions:
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-11/ssc2008-11a.shtml
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-11/ssc2008-11b.shtml
Lastly if you want print a poster for your self, go here and download the 36"x48" poster:
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/features/downloads.shtml
The best way to see the entire image is to use one of the zoomables, it does not require huge amounts of bandwidth, plus you can still take screen caps of something interesting.
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-11/moreinfo.shtml
One of the zooms was made by us here at spitzer the other is a more detailed version put out buy the GLIMPSE team.
Hope everyone enjoy's these images plus many many others that are already posted on the spitzer site.
Happy Spitzer Employee
If you look at some of the pictures it seems as though Chevy made the milky way. Might want to invest in their stock since the Milky Way is still going strong.
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-11/ssc2008-11a.shtml
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-11/ssc2008-11b.shtml
Now the world has gone to bed
Darkness won't engulf my head
I can see by infrared
How I hate the night
Now I lay me down to sleep
Try to count electric sheep
Sweet dream wishes you can keep
How I hate the night
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Imagine being able to walk down the length of a 180 feet wide image. It's hard to beat that for an opportunity to experience the size and complexity of the Milky Way (except, of course, for a trip out to the desert on a clear night).
The best part is that even at 180 feet wide, 400,000 pixels yields 185 dpi. That's better than your computer monitor!
Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be flying down to St. Louis and paying admission to the AAS conference just to see it...not with the price of airline tickets these days. However, if the local science museum is amenable to a new exhibit...