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Space Pictures From Near and Far

Posted by timothy on Thu Jan 31, 2002 09:21 PM
from the mostly-empty dept.
Space Science
Buran writes: "The BBC News has a fine story about the how our galaxy looks from the outside according to the 2-Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS). The article describes the shape of our galaxy (a barred spiral; all those books showing concept paintings of a regular spiral galaxy will be out of date now) and how the survey was done (near-infrared measurements of 500 million carbon stars). For the first time, we can see the center of our own Milky Way. All our worldly troubles seem so small..." That takes care of the big picture; Chris McKinstry has submitted news of much closer but just as exciting shots of Saturn -- read below for more on those.

mindpixel writes: "I was very excited when I saw this amazing shot of Saturn come up on the control room monitors of the VLT in November, and I'm even more excited that as of today the image is finally public. It is possibly the sharpest view of Saturn's ring system ever achieved from a ground-based observatory. All of us here at the observatory are quite proud of it, especially the NAOS-CONICA team."

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  • Had the title been simply "Pictures From Near And Far", nobody would read it. But, the addition of "Space" makes it infinitely more attractive.

    Try it. Space Ice Cream. Yum! Ice Cream. Boring. Space Frisbee! Exciting! Frisbee. Dull, lifeless. Space Herpes! Oh, wait...

    - A.P.
  • To be honest, I was always a bit dissappointed that I wasn't living in a barred spiral. Turns out I am. Nifty. :)

  • Great pictures! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FrostedWheat (172733) on Thursday January 31 2002, @09:32PM (#2935247)
    I can't wait until Cassini gets within range of Saturn, it is definitly one of the most amazing things in the sky. Unfornatually it's largly been ignored by many high-power telescopes and space probes.

    What NASA/ESA and all the other agencies in the world need to do is send out a swam of probes to *every* planet - a little science is better than no science!

    • Re:Great pictures! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Witchblade (9771) on Thursday January 31 2002, @10:09PM (#2935387) Homepage
      What NASA/ESA and all the other agencies in the world need to do is send out a swam of probes to *every* planet - a little science is better than no science!

      Yes, and I'm sure they'd love to do it. The problem, as always, is funding. In the early days of the Space Race Soviet and American taxpayers gladly ponied up the cash for spaceprobes, just for the bragging rights to be 'first'. After that was accomplished we've entered phase 2: probes can only get funding by exploiting the 'search for possible life' angle. We're throwing probe after probe at Mars (and consequently billions and billions of dollars) yet we haven't even seen Pluto.

      Quick and dirty Pluto flybys keep getting canceled almost as soon as any funding is approved, even though most of us working in the space sciences would gladly relocate funding from projects we're involved in just to get something simple like Pluto-Kuiper Express of the ground.

      The public won't have it, though. Now to explain why we should send a 'swarm' of spacecraft to places they've never heard of. We astronomers have the advantage of the huge amount of unknown in searching for planets. We can, in mostly good conscience, play the Lifecard in proposals to study any stellar phenomena. Geologists are stuck with just two at his point: Mars and Europa.

      Just think of all we don't know about our own moon. Where is the swarm of really cost-effective probes we could be sending there? The only time anyone took notice was when a military craft found very shaky evidence for a possible tiny bit of water in a shadow of a small crater near the pole. The only return visits under any serious consideration are desgined soley to test that finding.

      If any exobiologists are reading, all you need to do is come up with a convincing argument for micro-organism in Saturn's atmosphere and I have the suspicion that Slashdot readers will get all the pretty ring pictures their hearts' could desire. ;)

      • The public won't have it, though.

        Who ARE these public? I hate them so much.

        I'm part of the "public", right? Or I used to think so, but now the more I hear about what *they* want and don't want, I'm lead to believe that they are all nitwits who couldn't tie thier own shoelaces and feed themselves if thier lives depended on it (which, since this "public" won't ever seem to just go ahead and die, I have to assume it does not).

        I believe the number one threat against America is NOT terrorism, it's the stupid and foolish.
          • Well I just happen to think that science, astronomy and the quest for knowledge is a better "pet interest" than building killing devices and using them on peasants in the third world while waving the "stars and stripes" so god damn close to your face that anyone who disagrees or dares to point out US hyprocrisy is part of the imaginary "Evil Axis".

            I fart in your general direction!

            • building killing devices and using them on peasants in the third world

              Again, maybe you should stop staring at your navel and become educated about world events. This is ludicrously wrong.

              imaginary "Evil Axis".

              I guess those 3000 people were imaginary, too. Let me guess: you are a fan of Chomsky, right? Here's a hint: He's a crackpot. But hey, you can believe what you want. But you'll be happier if you live in the real universe rather than Chomsky's mentally unbalanced one.

                • I'll be honest with you. I'm not trying to blow you off, but Chomsky is not worth my time to refute. If you search around on the Internet, you can find people with more energy than I have on this issue.

                  Here's one thing to think about: when someone is so over-the-top critical, and can't find ANYTHING to say that's good, that should be your signal that he's probably leaving out a lot of facts. Chomsky's great mental flaw is selective facts. He only selects facts that support his theories, but ignores anything that does not support his theories. Of course, using that method, you can prove just about anything and even claim a "factual" basis for the claims.

                    • If you consider yourself even *slightly* intellectual, it's never a waste of time to refute someone based on facts.

                      I didn't say that I haven't refuted him to my own satisfaction, I just don't think he's worth my time to refute him to others. He simply isn't that important. But by all means, make your own conclusions.

                      You cannot simply blow off someone of Chomskys caliber: he is an internationally celebrated speaker/author/thinker.

                      He's a celebrated linguist, not a political thinker. He is simply more proof that someone can be very, very intelligent, but way off base when it comes to understanding politics. By all accounts, the Unabomber was a highly intelligent person. That doesn't make him any more mentally balanced.

                      I don't know Chomsky, except by his writings. And based on his writings, I have concluded that he is mentally unbalanced. He has so much emotional hatred of the United States that it clouds his thinking. It's beyond simple policy disagreement. I doubt he's dangerous like the Unabomber, but they have more in common than many would like believe.

                      Maybe you are scared that you might discover Chomsky is right about a lot of things?

                      I'm sure he's right about something amid all that frothing and foaming. As they say, a broken clock is right twice a day. Even the Unabomber's manifesto had some good points about technology and civilization. But if there is something "right" about Chomsky, there's nothing there that you can't find from more reasonable thinkers.

      • Re:Great pictures! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by FrostedWheat (172733) on Thursday January 31 2002, @10:06PM (#2935377)
        True, but the various space agencies could spread the cost like they did with the International Space Station. I doubt if any one single country would/could have done that.

        USA/Russia could prove valuable help with there long experience in space. Europe could provide the launch vehicle. There are many other countries that could provide valuable help with the design and building of the actual probes. Help make them smaller and tougher than before.

        Missions like Cassini/Galelio are very expensive, but they are designed to stay in orbit for years. Look how much great data the Voyagers returned on there quick passes of each planet.

        Imagine the images Galelio could have given us if it had been in orbit when the string of comets hit! With small, replacable, probes constantly in orbit of the various planets we'd be much better placed to observe these extremly rare events. Then they send in the big missions, when they know it's worth it.

      • I am (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Wyatt Earp (1029)
        You know, if the United States Federal Government would get off it's duff, reform the tax system and be a little more responsable with where it spends money there would be the dollars for these things.

        The EU won't foot the bill for a swarm of probes, so that leaves the US, Canada and Japan.

        However, if they scaled up production of these things, the economy of scale would kick in and the overall price of these beasties would drop.

        Right now, the probes are a one time knockoff and are as expensive as a Italian exotic sportscar is compared to a Lexus or Lincoln.

        • It's a neat idea but "micropayments" are impossible/impractical with today's financial system. If there was an easy way to charge $0.001 for clicking on a link, it would have already taken the web by storm.

          Too bad, it WOULD be nice for a lot of things, but we're going to have to wait.

  • Wait... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xfs (473411) on Thursday January 31 2002, @09:40PM (#2935276)
    Isn't micron symbolized by a "" ?
    It would be 2ASS then... looks like something someone would say in an AOL chat room...
    please flame me if I'm wrong.
    • Yeah, Micro is abreviated with mu. However, since mu doesn't exist in the ASCII set, people usualy type 'u'. Then the satalite would actualy be uASS, which I'm sure they wanted to avoid. By the way, has anyone found a link to a picture from the top down? All I see is from the side.

  • For sale cheap: (Score:5, Funny)

    by 3prong (241218) on Thursday January 31 2002, @09:51PM (#2935319)

    For sale: One novelty T-shirt, displaying the (formerly correct) image of the Milky Way, and the words "You Are Here" with arrow. Lightly used. Almost clean.

  • Moving further out, apparently our Galaxy-cluster as viewed from the outside, looks kind of like a small handful of Swedish meatballs, wrapped in lavendar tissue paper and tied with a length of green and yellow ribbon.

    Or so I'm told....

  • Billions and billions... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Teancom (13486) <david@@@gnuconsulting...com> on Thursday January 31 2002, @09:58PM (#2935347) Homepage
    I jumped on the space bandwagon late, and it's really only been recently that I've developed an interest at all. So I'm in a unique position of learning basic facts that others take for granted, at an age where I can appreciate the grandeur. For instance, the fact that there are truly *billions and billions* of stars *just in our galaxy*. That had me reeling for a couple of days... I don't want to ramble, but *man* is space cool. And space icecream is cool, too, I guess :-)
    • I too had a recent revelation.

      Given the local density of the universe, there should be around 100 star systems within 20 lightyears of the Earth. In fact, we've already identified 76 such star systems. For those that are interested this site [wisc.edu] lists the closest 26 stars (as opposed to star systems, which might be binary, trinary, etc.). There is also a more technical listing [gsu.edu] of the 100 closest known star systems (out to 24 lightyears).

      Expanding away geometrically there would be about 1,700 star systems within 50 lightyears, and 13,000 within 100 lightyears. Fact of the matter is we don't even know which stars most of these are, since the majority of stars are relatively small and small stars rarely have their distance calculated.

      If we ever do figure out how to get up close to light speed, then there is plenty of real estate to explore. Hell, if it turns out that life really is quite common, then maybe little green men actually can afford to come visit us.
  • Sorry to say it, but that picture of Saturn is just too perfect, it looks like a cheap computer rendition. Can we go back to the less sophisticated, grainy pictures? They were more exciting and seemed more "real".

    • Re:Saturn too perfect (Score:4, Informative)

      by Graymalkin (13732) on Thursday January 31 2002, @10:42PM (#2935474) Homepage
      In actuality it IS a cheap computer rendition. The Saturn image was done in the H and K bands (both in the infrared region) which people can't see. The sensors store an 8-bit sample for each pixel. If you looked at a rasterized image from one of these sensors it would just be an 8-bit greyscale image. These are rather boring to look at so the astonomers apply these grayscale images to colour channels of an RGB image. SO what they are doing is assigning a band you can't normally see (infrared) to bands you can see so you're impressed. This leads to confusion though because the final images don't LOOK anything like they would through a normal telescope. Saturn for example, the rings are super bright and crappy looking. This is because they are formed of ice crystals and dust which relfects infrared radiation pretty well. The original greyscale raster would look just as bright but the ring would be a really light shade pretty close to white in both the H and K bands. Older pictures of Saturn have usually been visual spectrum pictures so they look pretty natural. Cheaper computers have led to many a misleading space photograph.
        • Yeah most every Hubble image you see is a multi-spectrum composite image. Most images are several colour plates combined with infrared and ultra-violet plates combined as a single RGB colour image. The crappy part is all the Hubble images that look so pretty and badass actually don't look that pretty and badass in real life. Hubble gets colour images by putting a filter over the light sensor and holding the apeture open for a long period of time (it is more complex than this really but it is essencially how it works) and then later in a computer that greyscale image is assigned some RGB values and composited into a three colour image. If you were to see a nebula up close and personal (you'd probably not be able to tell you were getting close to one) it would look very grey and bland. You'd also have trouble seeing it because the sheer lack of density. Atoms and molecules in nebulae are really really far apart and in a cubic kilometer of space there might only be a handful of matter. The farther you get your pixel is picking up the radiation from many more cubic kilometers of space giving you a higher average amount of radiation making for better imaging. As you get closer your sensor pixel is seeing less and less cubic kilometers of space and thus gets less radiation making it more difficult to see the large structure you're flying inside of. So Hubble imagry is just ellaborate faking. The stuff you get from space.com is processed more than Kraft singles.
    • I posted my parent comment semi-seriously; this time let me say it more seriously. When I read this: "It is possibly the sharpest view of Saturn's ring system ever achieved from a ground-based observatory," I was expecting to see all sorts of details, bumps, variations in the rings, basically some texture. But Saturn and its rings look smooth, way too smooth. With the old grainy pictures, I would fill in the details with my imagination. So I guess it's kind of like a movie versus the book its based on; with the book, you just imagine what everything looks like. So yes, it's a sharp picture, but simply not high enough resolution to capture details that I thought it would.

  • newest Galactic Center release, in color (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ghostlibrary (450718) on Thursday January 31 2002, @10:18PM (#2935413) Homepage Journal
    At the AAS meeting a few weeks ago, a Chandra (X-Ray observatory) team produced this stunning mosiac of the Galactic Center [harvard.edu].
    It's amazing. Also, apparently the supposed massive black hole in our galaxy's center is 'off', so there's not a lot of emission from it, instead we see remnants of earlier activity (such as Sagittarius A).
    • Hah! I've heard that one before! "No really, we took a picture of the galactic center but it was off at the time!".

      What? Is it having its lightbulb changed or something?

      Sheesh.

      ;-)

      • Re:newest Galactic Center release, in color (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ghostlibrary (450718) on Friday February 01 2002, @01:38AM (#2935964) Homepage Journal
        I know your post was funny (+1) and rhetorical (+1), but I thought I'd answer it anyway because, hey, I'm pedantic (-1).

        Central black holes only are bright if they are sucking in matter. When they suck in matter and generate radiation, the radiation tends to blow away the surrounding gas a bit. Also, just sucking in the matter of course depletes the region.

        So after a bit, the space around the central black hole gets kinda sparse and there's not much for it it eat, so things cool down. This lets the gas further out get dragged in a bit (since there's not as much radiation blowing it away) and eventually enough accumulates that the emission from the black hole increases again.

        A lot of astrophysical stuff has cycles of basically 'eat and blow, thus clearing out the area, then sit there empty until more food gets drawn to you by your superior mass'.

        If you imagine a fat friend with a PS2 who requires chips and soda, you get the picture-- people get sucked in by the cool PS2 games but when the chips are gone and the farting has cleared out the area, he sits there alone until things have time to settle and friends begin to get drawn back to the PS2 again. [Yeah, I know, I'm now a Contendor for Worst Analogy of 2002].
  • Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, And things seem hard or tough, [clunk] And people are stupid, obnoxious, or daft, And you feel that you've had quite enough, [boom]

    [singing] Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour, That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned, A sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see Are moving at a million miles a day In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour, Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

    Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars. It's a hundred thousand light years side to side. It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick, But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide. We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point. We go 'round every two hundred million years, And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe. [boom] [slurp]

    The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding In all of the directions it can whizz As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know, Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is. So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, How amazingly unlikely is your birth, And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

  • astronomy and computing... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by supernova87a (532540) <<kepler1> <at> <hotmail.com>> on Thursday January 31 2002, @10:54PM (#2935512)
    Take a look at that picture of the center of the galaxy again -- one of the biggest challenges to astronomy is how to catalogue every single object visible and create a rapidly searchable database. And that picture is not even 10% of the sky, in only one band! Astronomers are having to come up with new ways of loading, structuring, and searching multi-TB datasets to get incredible science out of the flood of data. The future of astronomy is in these multi-TB databases, in multiple wavelengths, which create the "National Virtual Observatory".

    If you want to understand the science that these databases would make possible, imagine if your business had a searchable database of the entire population of the world, with parameters like age, height, weight, income, address, phone number, spending habits, and more, for every single person.

    Have a look at this link [us-vo.org] for what some scientists think a virtual observatory will be capable of!

  • Not 'first time' we see center of galaxy. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Michael Woodhams (112247) on Thursday January 31 2002, @11:21PM (#2935582) Journal
    As is so often the case in journalism, this claim is wildly overselling things (and is not made in the BBC article.) I was using IRAS (infrared astronomy satellite) and various earthbound surveys (including the much earlier TMSS two micron all sky survey) around 1990, and have an IRAS poster from that era at home showing our galaxy (including the core.) Similarly, we have known for over a decade that our galaxy is a barred spiral.

    Is this a case of the more overblown your submission, the more likely slashdot is to carry the story?

    I'm not knocking the 2MASS survey - high quality all sky surveys like this lead to huge amounts of high quality science.
    • I should have read more carefully - the BBC article *does* incorrectly claim this as a first: "Evident in the map, and seen directly for the first time, is the cigar-shaped bar..."

      My apologies to the submitter of this story.

      Also, I have checked and found it was COBE (cosmic background explorer) not IRAS that made my poster. Here [nasa.gov] it is. Notice how this too reveals the squarish, thicker towards the edges shape of the bulge indicating a bar seen obliquely.
      • While I don't doubt what you say, the link you provided really doesn't help alot. It isn't easy to deduce that the galaxy is a barred spiral from the image and the write up even claims that the Milky Way is a "typical spiral galaxy", as opposed to the minority case (about 1/3rd) of being a barred spiral. Even now knowing what a barred spiral is, I can really say the image from COBE actually shows this. But the COBE image was derived from the same technique as this (polling infrared light), so I would assume they came to the same conclusion.

  • To Those in the Know (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Alpha State (89105) on Thursday January 31 2002, @11:39PM (#2935633) Homepage

    Why isn't there a big blind spot on the opposite side of the calactic center? Can the MASS see through the center, or are they just filling in what they assume is there?

    Furthermore, can we see objects farther away on the opposite side of the galactic center? If not, how big is the blind spot?

    • The image on the BBC site is an edge-on view of our galaxy. The story submission for this is a bit misleading. There are no pictures anywhere on the MASS site which show a "top-down" view which shows us the bars (unless there's one I've missed - anyone?).

  • They got movies too (Score:4, Informative)

    by Alien54 (180860) on Thursday January 31 2002, @11:46PM (#2935650) Journal
    quick time format, various sizes (5.8mb, 9.5mb, 41mb)

    http://www.ipac.caltech.edu/2mass/gallery/gc_movie .html

    it's of the galactic center

    pretty cool

  • I'm sure it's been posted before, but I don't have the patience to look for it.

    MMMMMM Milky Way. That is the first thing that I thought of when I read the article. I could sure go in for a candy bar.

    And (okay now I'm getting deep) that's the problem with getting funding for space probes. My stomach is a lot more important to me than Uranus (or Pluto). Even if it costs next to nothing, I don't want to spend money on a probe when I could be spending money on making my life nicer.

    Knowledge is all well in good, but there's no nugguty center.

    Sweat
  • Nice picture of the galaxy [bbc.co.uk]... but was anyone else disappointed to find that the little red arrow with the words "You are here" was absent?
    • Well considering it's a composite of images taken from the point where the arrow would be pointing (better known as "here") you'd just see a big red arrow pointing out of the picture ;)

      Doug

    • Re:hmmm (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Wombat (6297)
      Your post actually is actually more culturally relevant than you might think. Gustave Courbet painted in 1866 a work entitled 'L'Origine du monde' (The origin of the world), which was a detailed painting of the nether parts of a human female. It was a private comission (some rich business guy wanted it), but raises the stakes on the old pornography or art question at a far earlier date than many might realize, besides the interesting commentary of the work's title. For the curious and over 18, you can view the painting at the Artchive here [artchive.com].

      Oh the things you learn in art history class.
      -Wombat
    • Please forgive my ignorance, but if we can get such a 'clear' image of saturn from the ground, how come we can't photograph the lunar landing sites?


      Saturn is about 340 pixels wide in the high-resolution version of this picture. With an equatorial radius of 60268 km this translates into a pixel width of 177 km on the surface of Saturn.

      The picture was taken from a distance 1209 million km, or 3215 times the surface-to-surface distance from the Earth to the Moon.

      177 km divided by 3215 is 55 meters, and that is why you can't point this telescope at the moon and photograph the descent stage of a lunar lander. Actually the resolution could theoretically be a little better if the photograph was taken att shorter wavelengths, but still not good enough to catch man-made equipment on the moon.
      • Saturn is about 340 pixels wide in the high-resolution version of this picture. With an equatorial radius of 60268 km this translates into a pixel width of 177 km on the surface of Saturn.


        Oops! 340 pixels is actually the diameter while 60268 km is the radius. So the pixel width turns out to be 354 km, and the corresponding resolution on the lunar surface would be 110 meters. Luckily, the conclusion is the same.

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