The Milky Way by Nasa’s great observatories: Spitzer - Infrared, Hubble - Visible/Near-Infrared, Chandra - X-Ray. (via JPL)
Peering Into The Heart of Darkness
So, yesterday, S. and I were watching Doctor Who, two old episodes (The impossible planet; The Satan pit) and the story involved a black hole, and I was thinking about black holes for all the episodes.
So, this morning I searched something about black holes. In the image above you can see Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole (a black hole with a mass much greater than the most massive stars) in the center of Milky Way, our galaxy. Sagittarius A* is 25000 light years away from Earth, and its mass is found to be 3.61±0.32 million solar masses.
Three Lasers and Light Pollution
The Keck I Laser propagating, alongside the Keck II and Subaru lasers. WMKO Engineer Andrew Cooper took over 90 x 1minute exposures from near UKIRT on the summit ridge on May 26. The result has been combined into the attached image and a video. The image combines 23 exposures, each 1 minute long. During the exposure, the Keck II laser is aimed over the camera at the Milky Way’s Galactic Center. The image also shows a car driving down the summit road which appears as a stream of light. (via W. M. Keck Observatory)
Wide Field Imager view of a Milky Way look-alike, NGC 6744
This picture of the nearby galaxy NGC 6744 was taken with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla. The large spiral galaxy is similar to the Milky Way, making this image look like a picture postcard of our own galaxy sent from extragalactic space. The picture was created from exposures taken through four different filters that passed blue, yellow-green, red light, and the glow coming from hydrogen gas. These are shown in this picture as blue, green, orange and red, respectively. (via ESO)
Milky way (by paperinikkio)
