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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.
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
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"
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
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.
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