World's Largest Milky Way Image Is 120 Feet of Humbling

[n2doc]

The world's largest picture of the Milky Way was unveiled today in Chicago, taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, measuring a whopping 120 feet across.

The panorama represents the combined effort of two Spitzer survey teams, who used two of the telescope's onboard instruments, the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) and the Multiband Imaging Photometer.

The large image was made from stitching together 800,000 individual pictures taken by Spitzer, for a total of 2.5 billion infrared pixels. It covers an area of the sky about as wide as a pointer finger and as long as the length of arms outstretched, which might sound small, but covers about half of the entire galaxy, says Robert Hurt, of the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech.

Just another friendly reminder that our entire lives are insignificant and that none of us will ever know one iota of the true mysteries of the universe that we live in.


http://gizmodo.com/5418883/worlds-largest-milky-way-image-is-120-feet-of-humbling

[sudopod]

1. Ummm, gotta disagree with one point...

"Just another friendly reminder that our entire lives are insignificant and that none of us will ever know one iota of the true mysteries of the universe that we live in."

Figuring out "the true mysteries of the universe that we live in" is the point of physics and astronomy. =D

[silverweb]

2. Amazing.

I don't consider our lives "insignificant," because we are a part of the magnificent whole and, as Sagan said, "We are star stuff."

However, the vastness of that amazing cosmos certainly helps deflate the self-centeredness, arrogance, and pettiness of many of our perspectives.

While we always seek to increase our knowledge, every new answer or discovery poses a host of new questions, and an eternal task of learning is before us.

[Vinnie From Indy]

3. Does the universe exist solely because we can observe it?

Does the wave function collapse because we peer into the heavens?