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Heart of the Milky Way Photos From NASA
PBH submitted a link to a really amazing composite image of the Milky Way released by NASA. They combined infrared, visible, and x-ray images taken by Spitzer, Hubble, and Chandra to create one beautiful image to commemorate the 400 years since 1609, when Galileo looked up.
Very nice! I now have a new desktop wallpaper!
You can download much larger versions of this image from the following link:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/28/image/b/warn/
I'm downloading the 50 MB TIFF at the moment.
It's full of stars!
A never-before-seen view of the turbulent heart of our Milky Way galaxy is being unveiled by NASA on Nov. 10. This event will commemorate the 400 years since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609.
The summary kind of missed the point of that sentence a bit...
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Depends on how far away they are.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
The image covers about 1/2 of 1 degree of the sky, or about the same size as the full moon. Given the 0.5 degrees of arc, the distance to galactic center (about 30,000 light years), I leave it as a simple math (trig) exercise to work out the extent of the photo in light years across.
Nah, no I don't. If we take the length of the triangle as 30,000 and the angle as 2 * 0.25 degrees ( to split it into two right triangles), then sin(0.25 deg) * 30,000 = 130.9 light years, times two, gives about a 262 light year wide image, which means each pixel at 1920x1200 covers a square of about 0.136 light years (1,286,631,860,000 kilometers) per side.
For comparison, that's about 8600 AU (Earth-Sun distance). The solar system to the Heliosheath (where the Voyager probes are) is about 100 AU. So each pixel is a square, 86 solar systems across.
Now that's a big pixel...
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
1 cm = 1 megafuckload kilometers = 0.621371192 megafuckload miles
Fixed that for you ;) Remember, this is an American site with American readers whom might not be familiar with the metric system ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Pfft. From TV I know we should be able to enhance the image enough so that we can see individual aliens by enhancing that pixel enough.
It's amazing how something so obvious in retrospect was such an intuitive leap forward in (ahem) the dark.
Telescopes existed for some time before Galileo, but in extremely limited quantities and mainly used for practical purposes, such as scanning for mast and sails of ships as they emerged in the horizon.
In those days, the church told you how the heavens went, and that was that. After plenty of leeway for intellectuals during the Middle Ages, a panicky Vatican was in full-tilt political damage control mode since Martin Luther had sparked a movement that split the church in two, with the support of a new, rich merchant class who were ready to challenge the power of Rome. A famous victim of this scramble to put the toothpaste back in the tube was Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for heresy, an inconceivable prospect a couple of centuries before.
Remember that Copernicus came up with the heliocentric idea to explain the embarrassing discrepancy of the Julian calendar having thrown the seasons off-sync (think an error in calculation of 15 minutes per year, then add it up over a millennium and a half). Even so, the first edition of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was published with a HUGE disclaimer that went along the lines of "This is a hypothetical treatise, an mathematical exercise, and is in no way intended to conflict with the canon of the almighty church". To get a feel for the times, picture yourself as a Darwinist teacher of Biology in Kansas, then multiply by a hundred.
Not surprising then that in this climate, it took a while before some foolhardy individual decided to get a bit creative with a telescope and point it up into the night sky.
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