Slashdot Mirror
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.
Here are some hi-res images - found them finally.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
On the NASA site (first link), hit the visual button at the bottom of the screen. You'll be sent to http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-11/visuals.shtml
You can download 3000*2400 versions of each mosaic, or download each individual tile (16 in total) at insane resolution. Enjoy.
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.
Why they didn't provide a link to the goods I dunno.
Anyway, it's here: http://www.alienearths.org/glimpse/
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
Here's a link to the zoomable explorer mentioned in the summary: http://www.alienearths.org/glimpse/
It's working fine for me on GQview, on Xubuntu. Konqueror loads it up fine, too. I didn't even try to open it on firefox; I know the image viewing on it sucks! For viewing images on a browser on my windows system, I use K-Meleon. I've often wondered why firefox won't add that handy little advanced zoom in/out feature!
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
The Milky Way may resemble M83: a barred-spiral with 2 main arms and other less distinct sub-arms:
http://www.eso.org/projects/vlti/instru/prima/images/image13.jpg
Table-ized A.I.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Alien Earths has some pretty good images of this thing
http://www.alienearths.org/glimpse/
The viewer is pretty slick
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
I believe all NASA (and I believe US govt funded) astronomical research data that isn't classified is eventually put into the public domain. Eg, all HST data.
But every mission and every observation has a PI and a team of researchers that have proposed that project, have done a huge amount of homework on why they chose the targets they did, what they hope to observe, and how they will do analysis. The PI's of the project are thereby given exclusive access to their data for a period of time. IIRC, for Hubble it's one year.
This period of exclusivity is to allow them to get the credit for their hard work in choosing the observation, and to prevent being scooped by fellow academics. It's like a very short-lived patent of sorts.
IMHO, a period of one year for astro data is a perfectly valid way to satisfy all parties involved. It also puts pressure on the researchers to get their asses in gear and publish, before someone can get at their data. But it lets everybody else use the data for their own purposes after the expiry date.
Of course there is the question of the data storage and retrieval service, and all the calibrations that need to be done on the raw data, and the effective HOWTO procedures for such calibration. Much of this is available, and for active projects there are help desks. Eg, for each of the sensors on the HST there is a specific help desk to provide assistance explaining how to get and process the data. But for older missions, there are no funds to provide these services. But the data should be there, somewhere. But you're probably on your own to calibrate it properly (or at least find older users of said data that can help you).
make world, not war
IrfanView worked fine for me, but be warned the Images are ~1gb of raw data each so if you don't have at least 1.5GB of RAM your computers going to be hurting on these.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
As a member of the MIPSGAL team, I'd like to point out that all the data used for the huge image has been public since it was processed. Whilst standard observing programs have a proprietary period of 1 yr (so the PI can get the science done that he designed the observations around), the Legacy programs such as GLIMPSE and MIPSGAL has a zero proprietary period. Legacy programs are selected on their ability to influence astronomy as a whole and provide data which may have additional uses (like I'm actually doing a secondary asteroid survey based on large quantity of data in galactic plane surveys).
You can also check out the Google Map version of the survey at http://mipsgal.ipac.caltech.edu/iracmips_map.html
There's also another version of the survey in Google Maps at http://mipsgal.ipac.caltech.edu/mips_map.html
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