Tag: galaxy

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Awesomeness Photoworthy Science & Technology

Our Favourite Space Images From 2013

Space is big. Really big. It would take a gargantuan trek of 21.24 billion kilometres for you to reach the outer edges of our solar system, and a further 435 sextillion (that’s 10 to the power of 21!) kilometres to reach the furthest region of the observable universe. There is so much to explore but what we’ve seen so far has been incredibly beautiful.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory keeps an extensive catalogue of cosmic images taken by the various spacecraft up in the heavens. Here’s a small selection of our favourites space images taken in 2013.

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Arty Awesomeness Featured Photoworthy Science & Technology

A WISE View of the Entire Sky

As part of an all-sky astronomical survey, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (or WISE) satellite took over 2.7 million images and beamed back 5 trillion bytes of data to eager astronomers back on Earth. This composite image is made up of 18,000 images covering the sky and shows more than 560 million stars and galaxies! You’ll notice that the prominent Milky Way Galaxy runs horizontally at the centre of the map.

The mosaic image has an oval shape and that is because of the method used to render the 3D sky onto a 2D map.

The sky can be thought of as a sphere that surrounds us in three dimensions. To make a map of the sky, astronomers project it into two dimensions. Many different methods can be used to project a spherical surface into a 2-D map. The projection used in this image of the sky is called Aitoff, named after the geographer who invented it. It takes the 3-D sky sphere and slices open one hemisphere, and then flattens the whole thing out into an oval shape.

Have a look at the full image after the jump.

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Awesomeness Entertainment Featured Science & Technology TV Video Clips

Inside The Milky Way

It’s a city of stars above our heads. The Milky Way is a galaxy that stretches a staggering 600,000 trillion miles from one end to the other. And in this National Geographic TV special, we are taken on a journey through the tumultuous moments in the history of the Milky Way, from the birth of this beautiful spiral galaxy all the way to its eventual death.

One of the images used in the documentary is the 800-million-pixel panorama of the Milky Way created by the Gigagalaxy Zoom project. As grand as the image is, it’s a side-on view of the galaxy that we see and astronomers use all manner of high-tech computer tools to work out what it would like if it were viewed from a bird’s-eye view. Watch part one of Inside the Milky Way below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsSGLmROQUw

Find the other parts after the jump, or you could just buy the blu-ray.

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