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Andromeda through new eyes
Tuesday, 6 June 2006 10:55 amThe Spitzer space telescope has been producing some really interesting pictures
Using infrared it has photographed the dust in and around the Andromeda galaxy. It is the nearest spiral galaxy to our own and seems to have about ten times as many stars as our Milky Way galaxy. It is so distant that the light we are seeing left it 2 million years ago -- we are looking back into the past 2 million years. There were no humans on Earth back then, just human-like ancestors.
Clicking on the image above will take you to a page that explains more about Andromeda. It also gives you the chance to download higher resolution images in various formats. I just spent more than an hour downloading on my slow dialup an 18MB jpeg image. :) But there are much more sane sizes there too.
For reference, below is a standard optical image of Andromeda:
Wikipedia article on Andromeda
More pictures and info is at http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/andromeda.htm
Using infrared it has photographed the dust in and around the Andromeda galaxy. It is the nearest spiral galaxy to our own and seems to have about ten times as many stars as our Milky Way galaxy. It is so distant that the light we are seeing left it 2 million years ago -- we are looking back into the past 2 million years. There were no humans on Earth back then, just human-like ancestors.
Clicking on the image above will take you to a page that explains more about Andromeda. It also gives you the chance to download higher resolution images in various formats. I just spent more than an hour downloading on my slow dialup an 18MB jpeg image. :) But there are much more sane sizes there too.
For reference, below is a standard optical image of Andromeda:
Wikipedia article on Andromeda
More pictures and info is at http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/andromeda.htm