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.

Comments

larger versions of image available here

[jrms]

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.

Re:How big?

[jnaujok]

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...