A close-up view toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy
taken by the Chandra X-Ray observatory. Credit: NASA/CXC/UMass/D. Wang et al.
Posted on 09/22/2009 4:54:35 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
New photographs of the center of the Milky Way reveal the chaotic environment at the heart of our galaxy, where a supermassive black hole is thought to lurk.
The close-up views come from two recent projects - one undertaken by an amateur astronomer. Stephane Guisard, an engineer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, used his personal 10-cm telescope to take 1,200 individual images over 29 nights during his free time. He then combined the photos, which took a total of more than 200 hours of exposure time, into a stunning mosaic image of the Milky Way's center.
The vista reveals an area of the sky spanning from the constellation Sagittarius to the constellation Scorpius. Running through the image is the dusty track of the Milky Way's disk - the dense Frisbee shape that contains the spiral arms of the galaxy. Colorful nebulae - including the pink cloud of the Lagoon Nebula (also known as Messier 8) - where furious star formation is occurring - dot the scene.
...
Guisard's image was released as part of ESO's Gigagalaxy Zoom project, which aims to connect images of the sky as seen with the naked eye, to close-up views taken with amateur and professional telescopes. Members of the public can explore the connected images online at http://www.gigagalaxyzoom.org/ to zoom in on the sky in extreme detail.
Another new look at the heart of the Milky Way comes from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The deep image, a mosaic of images taken during 88 individual observation sessions, reveals the area around our galaxy's humongous central black hole, Sagittarius A*. ...
The images also show mysterious filaments, or strands of X-ray light that scientists think represent large magnetic structures interacting with streams of very energetic electrons released by rapidly spinning neutron stars.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
A close-up view toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy
taken by the Chandra X-Ray observatory. Credit: NASA/CXC/UMass/D. Wang et al.
This image, showing the center of the Milky Way, from the constellation Sagittarius
to the constellation Scorpius, was taken by amateur astronomer and astrophotographer Stephane Guisard.
I still maintain that the universe is vastly overated...
Thank goodness for digital cameras. Practice Practice..
I think I managed to pick up M-51 in this one.
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/5418/img8546r.jpg
I actually need much longer exposures at a lower ISO value so I can lose some of the grainyness but I need to be able to track with the stars to avoid smearing them .
That is GREAT WORK! I have a good friend who works up there. He is in charge of keeping the electricals working...ALL of them!
ping
It was a 30 second exposure at f/3.5 ISO 800.
I would be better at ISO 400 or less with an exposure of 90 seconds or so. Unfortunately I’m not set up to track with the stars yet so a longer exposure would show the stars as streaks.
Those are beautiful pics, kudo’s!
ping
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