Added 1 new A* page:The newest, highest-detail infrared survey of the galactic core:
image by ESO/VVV Consortium, acknowledgement Ignacio Toledo, Martin Kornmesser (source)
^ Our galaxy's central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, is in there somewhere!
That view is the highest zoom available of the gold spot you see in the top center of the full survey area seen below (compared with a visible light view of the same region, beneath it):
image by ESO/VVV Consortium/Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org), acknowledgement Ignacio Toledo, Martin Kornmesser (source)
The survey covered the entire galactic bulge (that's the bulbous center area of our galaxy), combining a mosaic of 1929 hours of observing time with the ESO's "4.1-metre Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA)" telescope into a "nine-gigapixel" image; the detail of the core comes from the highest zoom level available in their Flash-based zoomable version; it and the site as a whole is running pretty darn slow right now, so I had to sit there waiting for a few minutes for it to resolve...hopefully it'll be a little more responsive by the time you read this, because there's a lot of stuff to pan around and see.
The ESO claims that the survey "contains more than ten times more stars than any previous study and it is the first time that this has been done for the entire bulge"; of the compiled 9-gigapixel mosaic, they say
| The image used in this work covers about 315 square degrees of the sky (a bit less than 1% of the entire sky) and observations were carried out using three different infrared filters. The catalogue lists the positions of the stars along with their measured brightnesses through the different filters. It contains about 173 million objects, of which about 84 million have been confirmed as stars. The other objects were either too faint or blended with their neighbours or affected by other artefacts, so that accurate measurements were not possible. Others were extended objects such as distant galaxies. |
They say they've already used the survey "to compile the largest catalogue of the central concentration of stars in the Milky Way ever created." I wonder if they've got Nena's sun in there yet. :)
~~~~~~
It's nearing the end of the month, which in this case means I have one art show wrapping up, and another one about to kick off. If there was an A* page whose original art was marked "held" that you were waiting on, check it now, because it the show it was in is ending and it might be available! The new show--also in Seattle--will have a hair theme, whee! The plan is to get it hung on Monday, so I'll probably have more to say then~~!
|
