Downtown, Γαλαξίας
January 5th, 2009 — Mark Przepiora
For anyone that needs a new wallpaper, here’s a breathtaking photograph peering into the center of our galaxy, thanks to telescopes Hubble and Spitzer:
More information is available here, or click on the picture itself for links to larger versions, including a 6000-pixel wide JPEG.
The amount of detail in the high-resolution version is absolutely amazing, but nearly insignificant in context: the picture captures an area 300 light years wide, or more than 3000 AU per pixel. Given that our solar system is roughly 80 AU in diameter, each pixel reveals a square of space 40 times wider than our own solar system.
We share an amazing universe.