Comments on: The cold arms and hot, hot heart of the fuzzy maiden

By: Space; the final frontier, now where have i heard that before « Fuzzypictures's Weblog

Wed, 23 May 2012 17:21:56 +0000

[...] with earlier images in infrared taken by Spitzer Space Telescope (which I’ve inset here) and a huge and incredibly beautiful newer one taken with ESA’s Herschel far-infrared telescope (and OMFSM you want to click that [...]

By: bottom-up

bottom-up — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 17:51:24 +0000

I know this is late but in the xray only image it appears that there is a rather large spheroid of shocked gas surrounding the galaxy’s core, Shades of Larry Niven. Too bad the Ringworld would be too small to spot at this distance!

Question. Which edge is closest to us, the upper right or the lower left? My eyes insist on interpreting the image either way with no effort at all; just a quick flick of the old Mark one eyeballs and the image inverts.

By: Tech Gadget Reviews » Which Photo Was Shot by the European Space Agency, and Which One is Amateur? [Space]

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 22:07:13 +0000

[...] make you salivate with jealousy over his skill (and equipment). [Steve Loughran via Daily Mail and Discover - Thanks, [...]

By: Joseph G

Joseph G — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 21:20:16 +0000

@32 Richard Woods: Thanks!
*reading*
Wow, human ingenuity never ceases to amaze me.

By: Qual das fotos foi tirada pela agência espacial européia e qual foi tirada por um amador? | Gizmodo Brasil

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 18:08:18 +0000

[...] fazer você babar de inveja de suas habilidades (e equipamento). [Steve Loughran via Daily Mail and Discover - Valeu, Christopher!] var random = Math.floor(Math.random() * 1000000000); [...]

By: Richard Woods

Richard Woods — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 07:35:52 +0000

@ #29 Joseph G

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolter_telescope — “X-rays mirrors can be built, but only if the angle from the plane of reflection is very low (typically 10 arc-minutes to 2 degrees). These are called glancing incidence mirrors.”

There are a variety of designs for X-ray telescopes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_telescope), but XMM-Newton, like Chandra X-ray Observatory, uses the Wolter I grazing-incidence design. See http://xmm.esac.esa.int/external/xmm_user_support/documentation/technical/Mirrors/index.shtml

By: «bønez_brigade»

«bønez_brigade» — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 04:24:41 +0000

Bad. Ass.

By: Joseph G

Joseph G — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 22:54:43 +0000

@#18 Matt B: I’m sure you could do it with Photoshop or Gimp, but I’m not sure exactly what you’re looking to do. And we don’t even know what colors, if any, aliens would see. if orientation is all we’re looking to establish, wouldn’t it make more sense to just have a monochrome image based on IR, visible and UV light, averaged together? Just so they can recognize what it is and how it’s oriented?
Or maybe I don’t understand what you’re talking about (knowing me, this is quite possible).

By: Joseph G

Joseph G — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 22:47:05 +0000

Ooh, another noob question: How can such detailed images be made of X-ray sources? Are there actually lenses and mirrors that can refract and reflect x-rays without lots of absorption or aberration?

By: Joseph G

Joseph G — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 22:43:58 +0000

This might be a clueless question, but why would dust that’s a few degrees above absolute zero show up so well in the infrared? Wouldn’t it be radiating most strongly in radio frequencies? I thought objects that were a few hundred kelvins or so were the ones that radiated most strongly in the infrared?

By: M. B. Cilek

M. B. Cilek — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 18:30:54 +0000

this is just great..
ıt is what I wanted to see..friends and especially you Phil, please do me a favor and provide me with tha names 2-3 heavyweight astrophysicists who will bother to read a 2 page document which will carry my new theory on “Galactic Rotation Curves”.. if they like it (I am sure they will be amazed) they can endorse it for publication on Arxiv..I am asking you because I am an outsider to this field and need your help..pls contact me,
strawberry at ttmail.com

By: Endyo

Endyo — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:55:03 +0000

I think the infrared image alone looks fantastic. It’s probably just the color, but with the spiral of the galactic structure it looks pretty impressive. I’d like to see a high res version of that.

By: QuietDesperation

QuietDesperation — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:35:11 +0000

Years ago I wrote a program to randomly generate images of galaxies. I was doing 3D landscape generation, and plopping a real image of a galaxy in the sky just looked wrong- it also needed to be CGI. A big bug in the color selection routine produced similar results.

By: jess tauber

jess tauber — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 12:14:04 +0000

I’ve seen the Kalium galaxy several times, but only on TV…

By: A Stone Mallet In His Hands | Whimsy Speaks

A Stone Mallet In His Hands | Whimsy Speaks — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 11:20:52 +0000

[...] color image of nearby galaxy M31. Just because I thought it was [...]

By: Messier Tidy Upper

Messier Tidy Upper — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 04:25:08 +0000

Wikipedia suggests M31 *is* indeed the largest in our Local Group see :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy

& Kaler photographic map image for it is here :

http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/and-t.html

& my fave video on Andromeda – and its eventual collision with our Galaxy plus much more here :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/10/26/felicia-day-collides-galaxies/

Hope these are interesting / handy for folks.

By: Messier Tidy Upper

Messier Tidy Upper — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 04:15:39 +0000

The Andromeda Galaxy is about the same size as the Milky Way, 100,000 light years across,

I thought Andromeda was a bit larger than our Milky Way Galaxy? No?

Great image anyhow.

By: Leo Serrano

Leo Serrano — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 03:59:59 +0000

What are those blue blobs -very faint- in the picture! They are above and below the galactic plane! I counted three above and perhaps four at the bottom. artifact from the pics?
Cool pics though!

By: Chief

Chief — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:32:37 +0000

Very nice, question though, the blue stars near the core seem to be very big in relation to the diameter of the galaxy. Is it a trick of the observed “light”. I assume it is around 100K L/yrs across. Must be a trick with the optics and amount of “light” generated by each object.

By: Matt B.

Matt B. — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:57:53 +0000

I had this idea while reading Buzz Aldrin’s Encounter with Tiber that to indicate in a “video” message to aliens which side of the images is the front (since they can’t presume the data are laid out left to right or vice versa), you could include a picture of something in space. But what you show would have to look similar enough to them as to us, and be asymmetrical. I figure a picture of the Andromeda Galaxy is perfect for trying to talk to aliens in the Milky Way, but for the encoding used in the book (base 8), I would want to reduce the picture to 1-bit color, so only pure red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta, black and white would be seen. Is there a Photoshop-ish program that will do that to a 16-bit-color picture?

By: Phil Plait

Phil Plait — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:53:46 +0000

David– looks like you were right, the image got mirror flipped. I corrected the image, struck through the incorrect text, and added new text. Thanks for pointing that out!

By: David

David — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:46:09 +0000

No problem. Glad to contribute something.

By: Phil Plait

Phil Plait — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:38:25 +0000

David (14): Hmm, I think you’re correct. Something may have happened when I cropped the IR image. I’ll dig into this and see what’s what. I was very surprised not to see any emission from the the two companions…

By: David

David — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:35:43 +0000

Actually the two images are inverted with respect to each other and the two companion galaxies are still present in the IR/Xray image. They are not invisible afterall.

By: JohnW

JohnW — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 22:37:39 +0000

“Andromeda (in mythology (or “Clash of the Titans”)”

Mmmm, Judi Bowker.

That’s just unreal, but am I the only one thinking the arms don’t look very spirally?