Spitzer's 5-Gigapixel Milky Way

James Harold writes "Today NASA unveiled a new infrared mosaic of our galaxy. The result of over 800,000 individual images collected by the Spitzer Space Telescope, it is the largest, highest-resolution, and most sensitive infrared picture ever taken of the Milky Way (and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future). Because Spitzer sees in infrared, it penetrates much farther into the galaxy, revealing previously hidden star clusters, star-forming regions, shocked gases, glowing 'bubbles' and more. The complete mosaic is about 400,000 by 13,000 pixels, and a 180' printed version is being shown at the American Astronomical Society meeting in St. Louis. A zoomable, annotated version of two different variants on the image (as well as some additional information on the science) is available at Alien Earths, a NASA- and NSF-supported education site." The Spitzer survey is already causing a stir potentially bigger than that raised when Pluto was deemed not a planet: two minor spiral arms of the Milky Way may be demoted.

Compression at it's finest

[nexeruza (954362)]

Wow they took a 400,000 by 13,000 pixel image and compressed it to a 200x200 jpeg to wow us net folks, stellar.

Re:

[PeelBoy (34769)]

That's what I was thinking. Where's the beef?

Re:Compression at it's finest

[dotancohen (1015143)]

That's what I was thinking. Where's the beef?

Are you kidding? I was scared to click the link to TFA thinking it might try to download to whole thing.

Re:Compression at it's finest

[icegreentea (974342)]

On the NASA site (first link), hit the visual button at the bottom of the screen. You'll be sent to http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-11/visuals.shtml

You can download 3000*2400 versions of each mosaic, or download each individual tile (16 in total) at insane resolution. Enjoy.

Re:

[complete loony (663508)]

I felt a great disturbance in the force. It's as if thousands of geeks suddenly cried out and changed their desktop backgrounds.

On a serious note, anyone feeling up to downloading the ultra huge versions and finding some interesting desktop sized visuals? And how long till the images are added to google sky?

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[MiceHead (723398)]

Wow they took a 400,000 by 13,000 pixel image and compressed it to a 200x200 jpeg

I giggled when I read this. But since I was also wondering: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-11/ssc2008-11a.shtml [caltech.edu].

Re:Compression at it's finest

[pgn674 (995941)]

Here's a link to the zoomable explorer mentioned in the summary: http://www.alienearths.org/glimpse/ [alienearths.org]

Re:Compression at it's finest

[mrbluze (1034940)]

Here are some hi-res images [caltech.edu] - found them finally.

damn iso.

[bronney (638318)]

well they should've shot it in low iso, those damn ccd noise is unbearable </sarcasm>

Re:

[aztektum (170569)]

Careful downloading those, you will hit your ISP cap

Re:

[Tony Hoyle (11698)]

1GB in a day is going to hit hard on most caps... I'm on 5GB (albeit unlimited evenings/weekends) but even if yours was 20GB it's a reasonable chunk.

Re:Compression at it's finest

[tuxgeek (872962)]

Alien Earths has some pretty good images of this thing
http://www.alienearths.org/glimpse/ [alienearths.org]
The viewer is pretty slick

Re:Compression at it's finest

[vrmlguy (120854)]

Here is a concatenation of all the screen resolution images into a single 14400x492 image: http://samwyse.googlepages.com/ssc2008-11b_medium.jpg [googlepages.com]

BTW, I created them from the caltech screen-res images using this Python script:

from PIL import Image
full = Image.new('RGB', (16*900, 492))
for i in range(16):
        piece = Image.open('ssc2008-11b%d_medium.jpg' % (i+1))
        full.paste(piece, (i*900, 0))
full.save('ssc2008-11b_medium.jpg')

really?

[Quadraginta (902985)]

You were really planning to click on a link pointing to a 20 gigabyte image? Then what?

Re:really?

[mrbluze (1034940)]

You were really planning to click on a link pointing to a 20 gigabyte image? Then what?

• Start downloading
• Go out for coffee
• Start missing slashdot
• Drink more coffee
• Come home
• Cancel download
• Continue browsing/posting on slashdot.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

• ???
• profit

Re:

[Quadraginta (902985)]

I was more interested in what would happen after he got the image onto the hard drive:

• Double click on "UnbelievablyHugeImage.tiff"
• Application emits malloc(-1) system call...
• ???

Re:

[mrbluze (1034940)]

I was more interested in what would happen after he got the image onto the hard drive:

Well, on a HD display of 1920x1200, you can potentially generate 2000 backgrounds. Cool huh?

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[Slorv (841945)]

It really isn't that extra.
We have no problem printing 20k pixels wide images. Our now rather old HP printer only print 106 cm but prints can be as long as the paper rolls allow.
At 200 px/inch the print will be 2,5 meters - really nothing fancy.
I do a couple of prints like that every month.

However, the cost of black ink for a picture of the night sky, that will hurt a bit.

Re:really?

[Hognoxious (631665)]

Next time maybe they'll take the picture during the day.

Bigger than Pluto?

[nebaz (453974)]

The average lay person is not going to care about the status of spiral arms in the galaxy. Everybody learned that Pluto was a planet in grade school. That fact gives the average person a stake in its status. When you ask about a spiral arm, you'll hear "huh?".

Pluto is not a Planet

[arthurpaliden (939626)]

He is a dog - sorry I could not resist it..

Re:

[Concerned Onlooker (473481)]

And anyway, it's just the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.

Two minor arms?

[sconeu (64226)]

How could they be less than 18 years old?

Or, for the baseball fans.... Are they going to send those arms back to the rookie league?

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[Tablizer (95088)]

The Milky Way may resemble M83: a barred-spiral with 2 main arms and other less distinct sub-arms:

http://www.eso.org/projects/vlti/instru/prima/images/image13.jpg [eso.org]
         

Accessibility

[by Anonymous Coward]

If this information is owned by the government, it should be free to the citizens, and hence free to google sky, or the other alternatives. Why doesn't this immediately go that direction?

I understand Google Earth/etc. being bound by paying terrestrial satellite owners for photos, but I would think NASA could get better public support if they were more available in the sky.

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[icegreentea (974342)]

Doesn't nearly all of NASA's images end up being released? I've heard that with Hubble bookings, images are kept private for a year or so while they process, and then send off to whoever booked the Hubble so they can publish findings/analysis first, and it all gets popped onto NASA website.

Re:Accessibility

[wass (72082)]

I believe all NASA (and I believe US govt funded) astronomical research data that isn't classified is eventually put into the public domain. Eg, all HST data.

But every mission and every observation has a PI and a team of researchers that have proposed that project, have done a huge amount of homework on why they chose the targets they did, what they hope to observe, and how they will do analysis. The PI's of the project are thereby given exclusive access to their data for a period of time. IIRC, for Hubble it's one year.

This period of exclusivity is to allow them to get the credit for their hard work in choosing the observation, and to prevent being scooped by fellow academics. It's like a very short-lived patent of sorts.

IMHO, a period of one year for astro data is a perfectly valid way to satisfy all parties involved. It also puts pressure on the researchers to get their asses in gear and publish, before someone can get at their data. But it lets everybody else use the data for their own purposes after the expiry date.

Of course there is the question of the data storage and retrieval service, and all the calibrations that need to be done on the raw data, and the effective HOWTO procedures for such calibration. Much of this is available, and for active projects there are help desks. Eg, for each of the sensors on the HST there is a specific help desk to provide assistance explaining how to get and process the data. But for older missions, there are no funds to provide these services. But the data should be there, somewhere. But you're probably on your own to calibrate it properly (or at least find older users of said data that can help you).

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[astrobabe (533099)]

As a member of the MIPSGAL team, I'd like to point out that all the data used for the huge image has been public since it was processed. Whilst standard observing programs have a proprietary period of 1 yr (so the PI can get the science done that he designed the observations around), the Legacy programs such as GLIMPSE and MIPSGAL has a zero proprietary period. Legacy programs are selected on their ability to influence astronomy as a whole and provide data which may have additional uses (like I'm actually d

Re:

[DMUTPeregrine (612791)]

Also, it would be pretty useless for google sky: it is IR, not visible.

Link to AliensEarths, mentioned in article

[sheriff_cahill (996608)]

http://www.alienearths.org/glimpse/glimpse.php [alienearths.org] and launching the viewer will bring up the zoomable image mentioned

Link

[phantomcircuit (938963)]

The image is here [alienearths.org]. Yet again great editing.

Direct link to the huge images

[Lord Juan (1280214)]

But, the images (the huge ones) are right there, here is the direct link to the huge images http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-11/ssc2008-11a.shtml [caltech.edu]

Of Tags and Men

[arnoldo.j.nunez (1300907)]

Okay, I realize the tag says !eliot, but when the summary says: Spitzer, penetrates, revealed, and shocked, it makes me think that Slashdot is trying to embed secret messages in TFS.

deep penetration

[liquidf (1146307)]

Because Spitzer sees in infrared, it penetrates much farther into the galaxy...

wow, never thought i would see "Spitzer" and "penetrate" in the same sentance together and *not* be talking about a certain governor

Misleading Title

[by Anonymous Coward]

And here I was thinking I was gonna see hi-res pictures of Eliot's whore with his jizz on it...

And the winning viewer is...

[istartedi (132515)]

You know you're going to have trouble viewing when downloading a JPEG actually takes a noticeable ammount of time over broadband. IE, MSPaint, Firefox, and a trusty little shareware image editor I use--they all choked on the first hi-res image. The surprise winner? The Windows Picture and Fax viewer that comes with XP. I was even able to zoom in several times, but it too eventually choked.

The failure of Firefox is a bit of a disappointment here. The Picture and Fax win is surprising since other MS ap

Re:

[Tatisimo (1061320)]

It's working fine for me on GQview, on Xubuntu. Konqueror loads it up fine, too. I didn't even try to open it on firefox; I know the image viewing on it sucks! For viewing images on a browser on my windows system, I use K-Meleon. I've often wondered why firefox won't add that handy little advanced zoom in/out feature!

Re:

[Dh2000 (71834)]

this [yellowgorilla.net] feature?

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[dotancohen (1015143)]

IE, MSPaint, Firefox, and a trusty little shareware image editor I use--they all choked on the first hi-res image

Eye Of Gnome opens them just fine. It's a great little program, and as a KDE user it's the only Gnome app that I use as a default. I didn't even try anything else yet.

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[Bitmanhome (254112)]

Likewise. But bear in mind, EOG took nearly a full gigabyte of RAM to do it.

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[DMUTPeregrine (612791)]

That's actually good. The images are about a gigabyte, so that would be about the minimum possible.

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[MadnessASAP (1052274)]

IrfanView worked fine for me, but be warned the Images are ~1gb of raw data each so if you don't have at least 1.5GB of RAM your computers going to be hurting on these.

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[smoker2 (750216)]

I think it's amazing you can fit 2+ GB of data into a 34.8 MB download. That's some compression.
the files use Adobe RGB 1998 colour space taking up 2.94GB (ssc2008-11a15.jpg), and when converted to sRGB they take up 2.2GB.
It takes the GIMP around 45 seconds to a minute to open these images on a dual quad core xeon with 12GB RAM. See .sig
Just for fun I'm rendering this image as a sphere ! 5 minutes so far, and it's at 25% ...

I have three words for this

[Khyber (864651)]

Epic Freakin' Wallpaper. I wish I had a printer that could do that size for my walls.

Wow

[QuoteMstr (55051)]

And to think that only a century ago, we were debating whether ours was the only "island universe". It's amazing to think what progress we've made in only a couple lifetimes.

One arm, OK. But TWO??!!!

[hyades1 (1149581)]

"two minor spiral arms of the Milky Way may be demoted."

I suspected something like this might happen, I just didn't dream that they'd go so far.

I mean, you have to be just a little suspicious about whether all star-forming arms are on an equal footing when you look at the names. There's Perseus and Sagittarius. Then we get to Scutum-Centaurus, and you have to wonder if the astronomers needed a leg up in the imagination department. And then all doubt vanishes when we get to the fourth arm...Norma. Yes, Norma. Like the girl who couldn't wait to get old enough to disown her parents, legally change her name to Chantal and get a job at the brass-pole ballet.

You just had to know they were having their doubts about arm number 4.

On a more positive note, the same bunch of guys who just slammed Scutum-Centaurus and, um, "Norma", are also telling us that they "obtained detailed information about our galaxy's bar, and found that it extends farther out from the centre of the galaxy than previously thought".

A bar that's closer to the house than you thought can't be a bad thing. Especially when you need to walk home.

Re:

[Jump (135604)]

Not seeing all 4 arms in infrared light is not new. In fact this has been known for a long time and it just means that those stellar arms are not density waves in the stellar disk. However, they are seen in the distribution of molecular clouds. Basically this means that the Milky Way has two overlapping spiral pattern: a stronger 2-armed mode which is in stars and gas, and another 4-armed mode which is only seen in gas. The 4-arm mode is weaker (as expected from theory) and extends over a smaller radius ran

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[hyades1 (1149581)]

I hope you got a look at the Spitzer view of Andromeda. Check it out:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051017070302.htm [sciencedaily.com]

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[Forge (2456)]

You mean like how I expected 800,000 separate images generated by Spitzer to amount to a respectable porn collection?

Or that to put them all together would make for a mosaic that should cause Larry Flint to blush?

Or maybe this is to explain the $5,000 "session". For that he got full rights to all recordings of his consultant's performance.

The big surprise of course is that NASA is distributing this stuff to help rescue it's reduced budget.