New Views of Our Milky Way Revealed

[mickw]

*More about Roberts billion pixel post*

New photographs of the center of the Milky Way reveal the chaotic environment at the heart of our galaxy, where a supermassive black hole is thought to lurk.

The close-up views come from two recent projects - one undertaken by an amateur astronomer. Stephane Guisard, an engineer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, used his personal 10-cm telescope to take 1,200 individual images over 29 nights during his free time. He then combined the photos, which took a total of more than 200 hours of exposure time, into a stunning mosaic image of the Milky Way's center.

The vista reveals an area of the sky spanning from the constellation Sagittarius to the constellation Scorpius. Running through the image is the dusty track of the Milky Way's disk - the dense Frisbee shape that contains the spiral arms of the galaxy. Colorful nebulae - including the pink cloud of the Lagoon Nebula (also known as Messier - where furious star formation is occurring - dot the scene.

More:   http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090922-milky-way-view.html