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Heart of the Milky Way Photos From NASA

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the do-you-need-newer-desktop-art dept.

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.

4 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. larger versions of image available here by jrms · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Meanwhile, on a mountain top in Hawaii... by Chris+Burke · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  3. Re:How big? by eln · · Score: 5, Funny

    1 cm = 1 megafuckload kilometers.

  4. Re:How big? by jnaujok · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.