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Great Observatories View of the Milky Way Centre

By catdynamics on November 11, 2009.

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.

From Hubblesite.org


i-24b09a0060ede34c53208950bf7f0fa7-hs-2009-28-g-web.jpg

Annotated image (click for larger version)

Full image collection at Hubblesite.org


i-7a8e40c4cda96bce82e34e673791fadb-hs-2009-28-c-web.jpg
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

pan in animation video

h/t Stjörnufræðivefurinn

Tags
astro

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By Craig Heinke (not verified) on 11 Nov 2009 #permalink