Largest Picture of Milky Way Galaxy
Remember the last time you tried to assemble your family for a group photo and how hard it was to squeeze everyone into the frame? Now imagine trying to fit 200 billion stars into a single photo… stars that span 7,054,199,780,000,000 miles in space.
The imaging team from the Spitzer Space Telescope has unveiled the largest, highest resolution infrared picture ever taken of the Milky Way galaxy. The GLIMPSE (Galactic Legacy Infrared Midplane Extraordinaire) photo is 180 feet wide (55m) and is composed of 800,000 snapshots taken by Spitzer. This photographic survey has 100 times the sensitivity and over 10 times the resolution of previous surveys, allowing us to see stars and dusty objects throughout much of our galaxy for the first time.
Most Important Satellites
Whether you realize it or not, you have likely used one or more satellites today. If you checked a weather report, watched CNN, or looked up directions on Yahoo Maps, you used one of the automated satellites orbiting the Earth hundreds of miles above your head.
Modern satellites are used for astronomy, communications, GPS, imaging, research, weather, and of course spy and military applications.
io9 has compiled a list of the most important satellites that make our modern life possible.
Microsoft Launches WorldWide Telescope
From the world of competitive astronomical websites (isn’t the Internet grand?) comes this new offering from Microsoft, WorldWide Telescope. Like others before it Microsoft’s new offering allows users to explore planets and other celestial objects. You can also view/track objects from any place on earth and in any point in time. Of course as you might expect from Microsoft there’s more going on than that. There is a lot of imagery from NASA including the Mars rovers, Hubble telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. There are also ‘tours’ set up by expert astronomers or you can even save your own ‘5 year missions’.
Like with Google’s ‘The Sky’ or the open source Stellarium users must first download the free WorldWide Telescope software from Microsoft (windows only).
WorldWide Telescope (via BBC News)
The World Sunlight Map
Two things we really like at Net-Warriors are cool images and cool technology and here’s an example of both. The World Sunlight map uses a combination of several satellite images, a DOD program that maps city lights and some very clever implementation to provide a computer generated approximation using real images to show what the earth looks like from space at the moment.
You can choose either a flat map or globe view and a few other variations. You can even embed it on your own web page if you wish.
The best way to summarize this site to quote the author himself - ‘While less impressive than actually being into orbit, this is much more accessible to most of us.’
(also if you have a little geek in you check out how it works).
Saturn Moon May Have Rings Too
Saturn’s second-largest moon Rhea could be a mini version of its ringed parent, and the first moon known to have rings of its own. Scientists detected the rings from an electron measurement when the Cassini spacecraft flew by Rhea in November 2005.
So far, Cassini has not been able to actually see the rings. If the spacecraft’s mission is extended, researchers hope it might be able to photograph the rings on a future flyby of Rhea.
Rhea, named after the classical-Greek Titan goddess and mother of Zeus, is a barren, icy world covered in craters. Its diameter is a little less than half that of our moon.
Bad Movie Physics
Most space movies focus on action and adventure, and treat the laws of physics like mere suggestions. In Hollywood’s version of space, you routinely hear the roar of rockets, witness fiery explosions, and have aliens conversing in English and impregnating humans.
This is understandable, of course. Who wants to watch Han Solo spend years on the journey to Alderaan, only to find that the planet has three times Earth’s gravity, and Solo can barely stand up and walk, much less swagger?
The website io9 has rated 18 movies based on how many laws of physics they mangled. The site purposely omitted Star Trek because it routinely violates pretty much every law of physics.
