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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.
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
Same here.
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/3903/milkywaycentercomp.jpg
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
1 cm = 1 megafuckload kilometers.
Depends on how far away they are.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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
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.
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.