Projects: International Year of Astronomy
The Year in Pictures: 2009
Zoom to the Center of the Milky Way
Zoom to the Center of the Milky Way
Credit: ESO / S. Guisard
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Gigagalaxy Zoom is one of many
exciting public astronomy events
that unfolded this year under
the umbrella of the International
Year of Astronomy 2009. Organized
by the European Southern
Observatory (ESO), Gigagalaxy
Zoom set out to capture three
views of the night sky that were
unprecedented in their detail,
each containing hundreds of
millions of pixels. The first view
was of the Milky Way as seen
by the human eye from a dark
observing site. The second,
shown here, is of the center of
the Milky Way as seen through
a modestly sized (10-centimeter,
or 4-inch) amateur astronomer’s
telescope. The third, of the Lagoon nebula, shows a huge area of the sky as seen
through a world-class professional telescope, the 2.2-meter instrument at the
La Silla Observatory in Chile.
This image covers an area 34 x 20 degrees in size.
It was assembled by astrophotographer and ESO engineer Stéphane Guisard
from about 1,200 individual images collected over 29 nights and totaling more
than 200 hours of exposure time. Although Guisard used a small telescope, he
had the benefit of some of the darkest, clearest skies on Earth, those over ESO’s
Paranal Observatory in Chile. The image covers the constellations of Sagittarius
and Scorpius and the dark, dusty lane that marks the plane of the Milky Way,
as well as a colorful region (right) that includes the stars Rho Ophiuchi (within
the blue nebula) and Antares (a supergiant star that lights up the yellow nebula),
Sigma Scorpii (lighting up the red nebula to the right of Antares), and a distant
globular cluster, M4 (the ball of stars below and between Antares and Sigma Scorpii).
The Lagoon nebula is the bright pink feature at upper left.
The version here is only a small fraction of the full resolution image, available
for download at the Gigagalaxy
Zoom website.
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