Space Pictures From Near and Far

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the shape of our galaxy (a barred spiral; all those books showing concept paintings of a regular spiral galaxy will be out of date now) and how the survey was done (near-infrared measurements of 500 million carbon stars).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."

The title of this article proves my theory.

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.

Re:The title of this article proves my theory.

Try it. Space Ice Cream. Yum! Ice Cream.

That's a poor example, because, in space, no-one can hear ice cream.

;-)

Re:The title of this article proves my theory.

The worst is when you get space herpes around Uranus.

(sorry, couldn't resist)

[ducking]

All this trouble?

It suffices to travel toward the galactic north for 50,000 light-years or so and snap a picture. Gee, why all the effort?

I always thought barred spirals were cool...

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!

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!

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.

Re:Great pictures!

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. ;)

Wait...

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.

Saturn

...exciting shots of Saturn

The first few are free, but if you want more goto Saturn's website and pay $19.95 a month and see all of Saturn.

Sorry couldn't help myself.
=)

For sale cheap:

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.

The shot they couldn't get...

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...

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 :-)

Saturn too perfect

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

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.

And, in nice friendly letters,

is a sign pointing at the Earth stating 'You are here.'

Barred Spiral?

Yippie! I always thought they looked cooler than those so-called "s1" galaxies. I'm soo proud to live in such an upscale neighborhood. Eat my dust, S1 riffraff!

newest Galactic Center release, in color

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).

Re:newest Galactic Center release, in color

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].

Unfortunate expectations

Is it just me, or was the picture of the barred galaxy just a little disappointing? Looks just like all the other pictures of spiral galaxies I've seen, except a little less spiral-like. Of course, if I knew what all the parts meant, it might be a little more impressive.

Unfortunately, once you've seen those mind-staggering pictures of galaxies and stars being born, you get a little jaded.

This is a little late,

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.

Who needs space?

When you have ASCII Star Wars? [asciimation.co.nz]

My god...

It's full of STARS!

astronomy and computing...

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.

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.

To Those in the Know

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?

They got movies too

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

Mmmmmm

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...

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?

Ancient News

We've known for over ten years that the Milky Way is a barred spiral -- where have you been?

Presence of a bar

we can infer the presence of a bar-like structure in the central regions.

But would that be Slim's Throat Emporium or the Evildrome Boozerama?

Where's the Big Black Hole ?

I was under the impression that the centre of our galaxy contained a large black hole or similar object. Can't see it on this one [caltech.edu], unless its that big glowy object they've false coloured about 2/3rds of the way down the piccie.

Anyone care to post a modified picture with a big arrow pointing to it??

Correct me if I'm wrong...

But all this proves is the location and distribution of these nearly burnt-out carbon stars. Perhaps the galaxy does indeed look like all of the previous artist's conceptions, but the arrangement of these near-death stars is oddly disproportionate to the rest of the stars, due to some quirk in physics we have not identified yet. I would not change years of extrapolation and calculations due to the location of only one type of star. That would be like basing the shape of the US landmass on the distribution of mountains only.

It all seems a bit premature to me.

Where can I find a higher resolution picture?

Where can I find a higher resolution picture of that external view of the galaxy? I didn't see anything at the 2MASS site. Are they the ones who created that image?

Yes, nice article, but meaningless graphic.

While the BBC article was interesting, and the thought of mapping half a billion stars is a bit overwhelming, I am stunned by the pointlessness of the included graphic. It shows the Milky Way from an exterior point on its equatorial plane. Almost all galaxies look alike from this position. What in the world is the author thinking? This is like taking the trouble to visit France, but rather than send home pictures of the Eiffel Tower, one sends home pictures of clouds and rainbows.

What about the time/distance factor?

I have to ask this, as it's perplexed me for a while - if the galaxy is about 125,000 light years across, when we look at the far reaches of the galaxy, we're looking way back in time at where they were *then*.

Do constructed photos like this one take into account that the features of the galaxy at that range from us have changed over that period of time? To phrase it another way, are we looking at the galaxy as it really is, with everything in the spots it would be in taking stellar motion into account, or are we looking at the galaxy as it appears to us with all that old light finally hitting the camera position?

Thinking about big distances makes my head hurt.
GMFTatsujin

Re:hmmm

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

Re:Fuck yeah

Even lamer than Apple Records?

"We'll give anybody who asks a contract." Riiiight.

Re:Just Think...

It seems some moderators are better at fucking what little karma a guy has than interpreting sarcasm. I believe that you all know the appropriate discussion by now. Good day.

Re:Ground based telescopes

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.

Re:hmmm

I guess that's why it's a *barred* galaxy. :)