Heart of the Milky Way Photos From NASA 111
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.
Seriously cool ... (Score:2, Informative)
larger versions of image available here (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/ [hubblesite.org]
I'm downloading the 50 MB TIFF at the moment.
Re:this is beautiful (Score:1, Informative)
It's full of stars!
Re:I know it is heresy (Score:3, Informative)
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...
Re:Seriously cool ... (Score:5, Informative)
Same here.
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/3903/milkywaycentercomp.jpg [imageshack.us]
Re:How big? (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on how far away they are.
Re:How big? (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Re:How big? (Score:3, Informative)
1 cm = 1 megafuckload kilometers = 0.621371192 megafuckload miles
Fixed that for you ;) Remember, this is an American site with American readers whom might not be familiar with the metric system ;)
Re:Seriously cool ... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/missiondetails.cfm?mission=Cassini [nasa.gov]
Re:How big? (Score:3, Informative)
Pfft. From TV I know we should be able to enhance the image enough so that we can see individual aliens by enhancing that pixel enough.
Re:I know it is heresy (Score:3, Informative)
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.