Thought I'd post this early today because I've still got lots of pressies to wrap and I can't do that until the sweet little darlings are in bed, so if I post now I won't forget.
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Rather than looking outwards at the vast reaches of space, I thought it might be good to turn our attention inwards today, all in a manner of speaking I suppose, because whichever way we look when staring at the heavens we are I suppose looking outwards, but this picture looks inwards toward the center of our own little corner of the universe, I give you The Milky Way.
In Jules Verne's science fiction classic A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Hardwigg and his fellow explorers encounter many strange and exciting wonders. What wonders lie at the center of our Galaxy? Astronomers know of some of the bizarre objects which exist there, like vast cosmic dust clouds, bright star clusters, swirling rings of gas, and even a supermassive black hole. Much of the Galactic Center is shielded from our view in visible light by the intervening dust and gas, but it can be explored using other forms of electromagnetic radiation. This haunting wide angle image of the Galactic Center region in infrared light was constructed using data from the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) satellite. The image maps three mid-infrared bands, otherwise invisible to human eyes, into visible blue, green, and red colors revealing the thermal emission from dust clouds near the galactic center that have been heated by starlight. The galactic plane runs along the middle of this image while the galactic center itself is the bright spot at picture center. The field of view of this cropped picture is about 1.5 by 2.5 degrees.
A higher resolution image is available here, this image is a 1.2 Meg Jpeg image.
Previous Pic Of The Day posts
23rd Dec 02
22nd Dec 02
21st Dec 02
20th Dec 02
19th Dec 02
18th Dec 02
17th Dec 02
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Rather than looking outwards at the vast reaches of space, I thought it might be good to turn our attention inwards today, all in a manner of speaking I suppose, because whichever way we look when staring at the heavens we are I suppose looking outwards, but this picture looks inwards toward the center of our own little corner of the universe, I give you The Milky Way.
In Jules Verne's science fiction classic A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Hardwigg and his fellow explorers encounter many strange and exciting wonders. What wonders lie at the center of our Galaxy? Astronomers know of some of the bizarre objects which exist there, like vast cosmic dust clouds, bright star clusters, swirling rings of gas, and even a supermassive black hole. Much of the Galactic Center is shielded from our view in visible light by the intervening dust and gas, but it can be explored using other forms of electromagnetic radiation. This haunting wide angle image of the Galactic Center region in infrared light was constructed using data from the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) satellite. The image maps three mid-infrared bands, otherwise invisible to human eyes, into visible blue, green, and red colors revealing the thermal emission from dust clouds near the galactic center that have been heated by starlight. The galactic plane runs along the middle of this image while the galactic center itself is the bright spot at picture center. The field of view of this cropped picture is about 1.5 by 2.5 degrees.
A higher resolution image is available here, this image is a 1.2 Meg Jpeg image.
Previous Pic Of The Day posts
23rd Dec 02
22nd Dec 02
21st Dec 02
20th Dec 02
19th Dec 02
18th Dec 02
17th Dec 02
