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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!
and yet, somehow darkly disturbing.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
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.
That's the whole Milky Way not just the heart, so of course it's bigger!
. . . there's no sign at all of Wisdom Chits.
(I wonder how many people will get that reference without having to Google.)
Peter! Peter! I can see my house from here!
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Where's the Great Barrier?
-mkb
The Keck I telescope quietly pouts. "We're pretty great," it says. "We're a great observatory."
"I know, I know," says the Keck II consolingly. "It's just a name; don't let it get you down. We'd beat them in a second if we weren't too big to put in orbit."
"Are you saying I'm fat?" Keck I cries.
"Come on, that's a good thing for a telescope, am I right?" the Keck says encouragingly. "We're the fattest!"
"Yeah!" Keck I says brightly, spirits seemingly lifted. But as Keck II returns to observations, Keck I still feels the sting of not being in the spotlight.
Later, scientists analyzing data from Keck I find minor anomalies, caused by unexplained water droplets on the primary.
The enemies of Democracy are
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...
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
That image has stellar composition!
So... He was using it to observe other heavenly bodies until then?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It was the first thing I noticed when I zoomed in. Well, after I noticed how much smog there is in the milky way. There should be an intergalactic summit on that - nobody should have to live with all that dust.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm pretty sure the whole segmented spinal column concept wasn't invented until the late 16th century. Ever see portraits from that time period and earlier? They didn't just figuratively have sticks up their asses.
So, who else is seeing a giant hand?
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. - H. L. Mencken
Heavenly Body? Uma Thurman? Oh sorry, I believe that was celestial body.
Excellent Shot! Where's the supermassive black hole?
does anyone know where can I download huge versions of these kind of images? I always wanted to make a poster, I thought of getting a big enough one to make it 300 or 600 dpi at a large size (at least 1 meter width), and have it printed.
I might just be being blind or stupid and missed it, but what is the scale of the picture? I want to get some idea of how big the things shown in it are.
"People laugh at me because I am different, I laugh because they are all the same"
O,o
What has been seen...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Anyone know where the area of the supermassive black hole at the center of the milky way is supposed to be located in this photo? Anyone with a version of this pointing out various popularly known astronomical bodies in the field? Some perspective would be cool to see on this starmap.
[...] to commemorate the 400 years since 1609, when Galileo looked up.
Galileo was born in 1564. I'm pretty sure that in 45 years he had at least one chance to look up...
Anyway, pretty picture. Now, in a few years when pollution and terrestrial lights has hidden the details of the night sky even in the remote, uninhabited regions, our grandchildren will say:
Grandad, did the sky really look so beautiful back then?
And we will bring out a wide, warm smile and say:
Not even remotely!
I am quite surprised nobody on Slashdot came up with this before. So I fired up GIMP to point out the obvious: http://pickhost.eu/images/0002/6185/milkywaycore.jpg
So this is the image of what is supposed to pwn us in 2012, right?
Sweet...
1331461 is only semiprime *sigh* Alas - I am just short of 1337.
I'm just waiting for Google to send a fleet of their black vans around the Milky Way so we can see it all on Google Street View. Perhaps one day we will be able to see the view outside the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Quick! Sell the location to the Melnorme before our Ur-Quan overlords detect our shields aren't working!!
-What have you contributed lately?
Any idea where, on this map, the bagel birds live?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5191040/Astronomers-find-Milky-Way-could-taste-of-raspberries.html
My God! It's full of stars!
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
You should have marked this NSFW!
right next to the super stargate that was photo shopped out.
That would be hilarious if you had a need to modify it much.
In light of the fact that you didn't (mirror image really), I'm terrified. Really, amazingly terrified.
The universe is a web meme, folks. 'night all. Sleep as well as you can.
What is the bright area to the left of centre? Just curious. Ta.
I browse /. today to find only 80 comments on something as significant as this photo yet find 600 comments on something as insignificant as xbox users being disconnected.
I weep for the future.
I should have washed my car...
I can't but I can see a giant mutant star-goat!
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
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.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty