Still working on an
Awesome combined image from Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra, showing deep view of the centre of the Milky Way, in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy.
Annotated image (click for larger version)
Full image collection at Hubblesite.org
Tricolore (click for larger version):
the images combines near-infrared imaging from the Wide Field Camera (3) Ye Olde Near-Infrared Camera (really, NIC mosaic - ouch - see comments) on Hubble, mid/near-infrared images from Spitzer, and soft x-ray images from Chandra, mosaic'd into a gorgeous false colour close up of the inner few tens of parsecs of the Milky Way.
The Black Hole is at Sagittarius A, in case you were wondering, its "radius of influence" is about a parsec (see bar on right for scale in annotated image).
Click here for full resolution zoomable image - it is Very Big!
Hubble press release, Chandra press release and Chandra blog,
Spitzer press release
Physical Science
Comments
Oops, no, it's NICMOS, not WFC3. I wondered when I first saw that image which was more likely; that someone had painstakingly surveyed a square degree with the tiny NICMOS field, or that someone had got their WFC3 images analyzed so quickly that they could put a press release out already. Turns out to be the first...
Posted by: Craig Heinke | November 12, 2009 12:12 AM