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.

Seriously cool ...

[electricprof]

Very nice! I now have a new desktop wallpaper!

Re:Seriously cool ...

[clone53421]

Same here.

http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/3903/milkywaycentercomp.jpg [imageshack.us]

Re:

[ElSupreme]

It will probably end up replacing my previous one
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA08329.jpg [nasa.gov]

The sun is being occulted, the reflection of the rings are seen on the dark side of Saturn. Not to mention the little faint blue dot just below the thickest part of the outer bulry ring, on the left side is supposedly Earth.

Re:

[afortaleza]

What spaceship took this picture ?

Re:

[ElSupreme]

The Cassini Huygens probe. It has been in orbit around Saturn since 2004. It also took some very nice pictures of Jupiter on the way to Saturn.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/missiondetails.cfm?mission=Cassini [nasa.gov]

Re:

[ElSupreme]

Ok so I messed up. The Cassini orbiter took the photos. The Huygens probe fell through the atmosphere of Titan.

I also saw this launch in person. It was pretty sweet night launch.

Re:

[Whiteox]

I looked hard, but I still can't find the black hole....

Re:

[spidercoz]

it's in the middle of uranus! sorry, I couldn't help myself

Re:

[Whiteox]

For a while there, they tried to change the pronunciation of Uranus 'Your Anus' to 'Urinous' But that didn't help much...

Re:

[spidercoz]

They need to just change it to Urectum and get it over with.

Re:

[Whiteox]

It's probably a shit planet anyway. No beaches or discos, bad service, high tipping fees etc.

Re:

[Chapter80]

A printed map? Don't they know that this is already obsolete? [space.com]

Can't we get this electronically on a Tom Tom, so we can find our way home?

Re:

[StikyPad]

You can, but the GPS might not behave as expected.

Re:

[physburn]

Amazing picture of the violent heart of our galaxy. There now obvious sign of a black hole there, but it hidden in the bright spot on the lower right middle of the picture.

---

Astronomy [feeddistiller.com] Feed @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]

this is beautiful

[Froze]

and yet, somehow darkly disturbing.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's full of stars!

Re:this is beautiful - Inkblot

[The Incomplete Lemon]

So, who else is seeing a giant hand?

Re:

[clone53421]

O,o

What has been seen...

Re:

[Whiteox]

I can't but I can see a giant mutant star-goat!

Re:

[Chris Burke]

and yet, somehow darkly disturbing.

Well yeah, probably because just to the upper right of the center of the image, you can see what is clearly either the Death Star or Unicron heading right for us!

But wait, there's more!

[Locke2005]

Here's one they missed [instockexpress.com]

Re:

[electricprof]

That's the whole Milky Way not just the heart, so of course it's bigger!

larger versions of image available here

[jrms]

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:

[clone53421]

http://www.mininova.org/tor/3140994 [mininova.org]

Re:

[tuxgeek]

Thanks for that link
But just wondering, where's the black hole?
There's suppose to be a great big black hole there somewhere. I'm not seeing it ...

Re:

[agentgonzo]

Black holes (whilst black) have an accretion disc [wikipedia.org] of hot material that glows brightly due to compressional heating under the extreme gravity. You can see this as the glowing white regions to the right of the image

Re:

[kalirion]

Wow, what resolution is your desktop to use that as the wallpaper?

Re:

[clone53421]

Maybe he wants to print it poster-sized. At 300 dpi, the largest image would be 32"x16"

Re:

[jrms]

Wow, what resolution is your desktop to use that as the wallpaper?

One day, big enough.

Re:

[mykdavies]

Wow, there's a Balrog staring at me out of that image!

That's odd . . .

[StefanJ]

. . . there's no sign at all of Wisdom Chits.

(I wonder how many people will get that reference without having to Google.)

Re:

[Unclenefeesa]

and how many will still not get it after Googling it !!

(did you Google it yourself?)

and then Jesus said,

[duckintheface]

Peter! Peter! I can see my house from here!

Re:

[thisnamestoolong]

From TFA:

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:

[camperdave]

So... He was using it to observe other heavenly bodies until then?

Re:

[gblackwo]

Heavenly Body? Uma Thurman? Oh sorry, I believe that was celestial body.

Re:

[niktemadur]

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 mod

Re:

[butalearner]

I'm pretty sure the whole segmented spinal column concept wasn't invented until the late 16th century. Ever see portraits from that time period and earlier? They didn't just figuratively have sticks up their asses.

Missing something

[mmkkbb]

Where's the Great Barrier?

Meanwhile, on a mountain top in Hawaii...

[Chris Burke]

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.

Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

That image has stellar composition!

Re:

[Overzeetop]

It was the first thing I noticed when I zoomed in. Well, after I noticed how much smog there is in the milky way. There should be an intergalactic summit on that - nobody should have to live with all that dust.

Re:Anyone else see the skeletal hand?

[Slartibartfass]

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 [pickhost.eu]

Re:

[mrsurb]

You should have marked this NSFW!

my god, it's full of goatse?

[Torodung]

That would be hilarious if you had a need to modify it much.

In light of the fact that you didn't (mirror image really), I'm terrified. Really, amazingly terrified.

The universe is a web meme, folks. 'night all. Sleep as well as you can.

Re:

[electricprof]

Excellent Shot! Where's the supermassive black hole?

BIG SIZE

[hjf]

does anyone know where can I download huge versions of these kind of images? I always wanted to make a poster, I thought of getting a big enough one to make it 300 or 600 dpi at a large size (at least 1 meter width), and have it printed.

Re:

[gblackwo]

Perhaps you are looking for the king size?

Re:

[clone53421]

Posted already, but in case you missed it: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/28/image/b/warn/ [hubblesite.org]

Re:

[clone53421]

Heh... I'm the one who created that torrent, and I've been seeding it ever since.

Re:

[antic]

I have been thinking about trying to get a Milky Way composite photo large enough to print and mount as a false-ceiling in my home office. Then have it backlit so the night lighting in the room is worth kicking back every now and then to stare at in wonder.

Re:

[clone53421]

Blacklight paint!

How big?

[Safaraz]

I might just be being blind or stupid and missed it, but what is the scale of the picture? I want to get some idea of how big the things shown in it are.

Re:How big?

[eln]

1 cm = 1 megafuckload kilometers.

Re:

[Shakrai]

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:

[bhiestand]

Remember, this is an American site with American readers

So we need this measurement in megafuckload football fields?

No! This is the imperial system we're talking about... what are you, stupid?

When you're talking about football fields the prefix changes to "hella". Football field size varies, so we're going with the NFL standard of 360 feet per football field.

1 cm = 1 megafuckload kilometers = 0.621371192 megafuckload miles = 9.1134441389 hella football fields

(Disclaimer: "mega" means "1,000,000" in this text)

Re:How big?

[clone53421]

Depends on how far away they are.

Re:

[Chris Burke]

There's an annotated image here [hubblesite.org], which inexplicably has a scale in light years/parsecs. I mean, it must be talking about at a particular depth, maybe the dust cloud the Hubble imaged? The arc-minutes/seconds scale, at least, makes perfect sense.

Re:

[melikamp]

Where's the black hole in this picture?

Re:

[monkeyhybrid]

Sagittarius A* [wikipedia.org], the bright source of x-rays just right of centre.

Re:

[mea37]

The Universe is flat, fool!

Re:

[pjbgravely]

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space...

Re:How big?

[jnaujok]

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...

Re:

[V50]

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:

[jnaujok]

Go back to "CSI: Miami" where that crap actually works.

"Look, I can tease infinite information out of three 8 bit numbers!"

Re:

[deathcow]

The entire picture appears about 45 arcminutes across. So if the full Moon drifted in front of this picture, it would cover all but the outer edges.

You are here.

[Taibhsear]

Anyone know where the area of the supermassive black hole at the center of the milky way is supposed to be located in this photo? Anyone with a version of this pointing out various popularly known astronomical bodies in the field? Some perspective would be cool to see on this starmap.

Re:

[jnaujok]

Sagittarius A* (the super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way) is located in the "white swirly thing" at the middle right of the image.

Re:

[afortaleza]

The only place "popularly" known in this picture would be Sagittarius A, it's the bright spot at the center right on the picture. That's where a massive black holes is supposed to be.

Re:

[smoker2]

Black holes aren't black. At ease, proles.

right next to the super stargate that was photo sh

[Joe The Dragon]

right next to the super stargate that was photo shopped out.

Huh?

[Smurf]

[...] to commemorate the 400 years since 1609, when Galileo looked up.

Galileo was born in 1564 [wikipedia.org]. I'm pretty sure that in 45 years he had at least one chance to look up...

Anyway, pretty picture. Now, in a few years when pollution and terrestrial lights has hidden the details of the night sky even in the remote, uninhabited regions, our grandchildren will say:

Grandad, did the sky really look so beautiful back then?

And we will bring out a wide, warm smile and say:

Not even remotely!

Intergalactic mug shot?

[Zantac69]

So this is the image of what is supposed to pwn us in 2012, right?

Sweet...

Re:

[clone53421]

If so, it's already happened... we just don't know it yet. ;)

A challenge for Google

[ciaran.mchale]

I'm just waiting for Google to send a fleet of their black vans around the Milky Way so we can see it all on Google Street View. Perhaps one day we will be able to see the view outside the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

I see a rainbow planet!!

[Dysan2k]

Quick! Sell the location to the Melnorme before our Ur-Quan overlords detect our shields aren't working!!

Where are

[SnarfQuest]

Any idea where, on this map, the bagel birds live?

It doesn't look like a raspberry!

[dhall]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5191040/Astronomers-find-Milky-Way-could-taste-of-raspberries.html [telegraph.co.uk]

Obligatory

[FirstTimeCaller]

My God! It's full of stars!

"Shaka-ri has been found!"

[peter303]

Sybok in Star Trek V.

What is the bright area to the left of centre?

[allanclloyds]

What is the bright area to the left of centre? Just curious. Ta.

How despressing...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:

[dargaud]

I've long noticed that pure science articles don't attract many comments and even fewer intelligent one. It's simply that few except a passing astronomer would have anything significant to contribute. While many people have a xbox and feel the pain that something might break their toy. Not really depressing but close.

Re:

[bhiestand]

For what it's worth, I agree entirely. I try to avoid commenting on articles where I can't add anything informative, and I'd certainly prefer it if more people would do the same.

I can see my house!

[tectomorph]

I should have washed my car...