quote:

t is the culmination of a decade spent scanning the night skies and would take half a million high-definition televisions to view at its full resolution. With more than a trillion pixels, this is the most detailed digital picture of the universe ever produced.

It replaces an image that is now over half a century old, created on photographic plates by the Palomar Sky Survey in the 1950s but still used by astronomers today.

By contrast, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's third and final release of data (SDSS-III) was created using a 138-megapixel camera attached to a 2.5 metre telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. It contains 10 times as many objects – such as galaxies, stars and nebulae – as the Palomar survey and scientists hope it will be used for decades to come by astronomers hunting for everything from dark matter to planets orbiting other stars.

"There are half a billion objects detected in this image," said David Weinberg, an astronomer at Ohio State University who worked on the SDSS image. "About a quarter of a billion stars and a quarter of a billion galaxies."

Each pixel contains data in five different colours of light. "That's green, yellow, red, redder than red and bluer than blue. We actually take five different images of each piece of the sky, looking through different filters," said Weinberg.

Each pixel is about one-three-trillionth of the sky, and overall the image covers around a third of it. "The way the telescope works, it takes its images in long stripes so that in one night it will get one big long stripe. That's why there are two big patches that are all filled in and then there are these other stripes coming out of it which are the other places where we extended into other parts of the sky but didn't fill everything in."

Click to expand the picture above. At the bottom is a map of the whole SDSS image, split into the views of the northern and southern hemispheres of our galaxy. At this scale, huge structures such as clusters and walls of galaxies become visible. At the top left, a fraction of the sky visible from the southern hemisphere has been blown up to reveal a spiral-armed galaxy called Messier 33 (M33). This galaxy is 2m light years away from our solar system and is spotted with nurseries where new stars are being created – visible as green dots throughout its arms.

"Those green filaments are hydrogen gas that is being lit up by the hot stars in the middle," said Weinberg. "And there's a lot of blue stars in the image that are all young, hot stars that are formed in this galaxy."

At the top right is a further close-up of one of these star nurseries in M33, called NGC604.

For the brightest million objects in the survey, the SDSS team also measured the full spectra of the light, effectively passing the radiation through a prism and splitting it into different frequencies. This allowed the scientists to measure the distance to the objects, which was then used to infer a 3D map of their distribution.

"The goal is to understand why the expansion of the universe is speeding up – that is the biggest puzzle in cosmology today, because all of our experience is that ... things fall towards each other," said Weinberg. "But, at the scale of the universe, gravity seems to be pushing things apart. In addition, we're monitoring the motions of about 10,000 stars to try to detect them wobbling back and forth to see if they're being orbited by giant planets."

The SDSS data and images were released today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. The 138-megapixel imaging camera that was used to take the millions of pictures that make up the latest image is being retired, destined to become part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian in Washington DC – a recognition of its unique contribution to astronomy.

HanabaL03 posted:

Has anyone heard the rumor that Betelgeuse is supposed to become a super nova by the end of 2012. It will be so bright you will be able to see it during daylight, and at night it will be as bright in the sky as a crescent moon.

Bad Astronomy posted:

It’s not impossible, it’s just really really really really really really really unlikely.

Astronomy Picture of the Day posted:

What is causing the picturesque ripples of supernova remnant SNR 0509-67.5? The ripples, as well as the greater nebula, were imaged in unprecedented detail by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2006 and again late last year. The red color was recoded by a Hubble filter that left only the light emitted by energetic hydrogen. The precise reason for the ripples remains unknown, with two considered origin hypotheses relating them to relatively dense portions of either ejected or impacted gas. The reason for the broader red glowing ring is more clear, with expansion speed and light echos relating it to a classic Type Ia supernova explosion that must have occurred about 400 years earlier. SNR 0509 currently spans about 23 light years and lies about 160,000 light years away toward the constellation of the dolphinfish (Dorado) in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The expanding ring carries with it another great mystery, however: why wasn't this supernova seen 400 years ago when light from the initial blast should have passed the Earth?

HonorableTB posted:

Even if Betelgeuse went supernova by the end of 2012, wouldn't we not see it for hundreds of thousands of years? Or however far away Betelgeuse is in light years? If we saw it by 2012, it would've had to went supernova a long time ago, which we know to not be true because we have pictures of the star itself.

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Sometimes a morning sky can be a combination of serene and surreal. Such a sky perhaps existed before sunrise this past Sunday as viewed from a snowy slope in eastern Switzerland. Quiet clouds blanket the above scene, lit from beneath by lights from the village of Trübbach. A snow covered mountain, Mittlerspitz, poses dramatically on the upper left, hovering over the small town of Balzers, Liechtenstein far below. Peaks from the Alps can be seen across the far right, just below the freshly rising Sun. Visible on the upper right are the crescent Moon and the bright planet Venus. Venus will remain in the morning sky all month, although it will likely not be found in such a photogenic setting.

bimmian posted:

vanilla slimfast posted:

Hubble IMAX is worth seeing just for the shots of them working on the telescope on the retracting arm with Earth in the background.

Bastard posted:

It's pictures like these that make me go: "you know, every once in a while, we humans are pretty loving cool".

IonClash posted:

Totally agree. Whenever I see Io, I always think of this guy:

Super Waffle posted:

Jesus!

Is that a Supernova Remnant? How long was it between shots?

Lono19 posted:

bimmian posted:

And to think, that picture was taken in 1995

Ularg posted:

Do you know what is just as good? Someone flew out far enough in space to take that picture, and I don't see anything keeping him from flying away.

bimmian posted:

That shot was actually taken when a (russian I believe) spacecraft was pulling away, it wasn't a spacewalk.

bimmian posted:

That shot was actually taken when a (russian I believe) spacecraft was pulling away, it wasn't a spacewalk.

Ularg posted:

Aww I was mistaken then, still pretty badass.

Bastard posted:

Don't worry though, I found your badass:


Click here for the full 800x800 image.

bimmian posted:

New picture of the moon! But they have a version here that is 24000x24000! You can see incredible detail

Bastard posted:

Don't worry though, I found your badass:


Click here for the full 800x800 image.

Lord of Sword posted:

If the Shuttle/ISS orbit at about 20,000mph, how does he not instantly disappear into the distance? Have we invented a jet pack that can travel at several miles per second or is it just inertia, like jumping while standing on a bus?


Content: Earth, the Moon, Jupiter and three of its moons (Io, Ganymede & Europa?) in one photograph (own hosting)

Lord of Sword posted:

If the Shuttle/ISS orbit at about 20,000mph, how does he not instantly disappear into the distance? Have we invented a jet pack that can travel at several miles per second or is it just inertia, like jumping while standing on a bus?
g.waffleimages.com/33cf6755d000ce78cbeb847d0dcc7d1100613a43/moonsaturn.jpg[/timg]

Lono19 posted: