The Milky Way panorama

This magnificent 360-degree panoramic image, covering the entire southern and northern celestial sphere, reveals the cosmic landscape that surrounds our tiny blue planet. This gorgeous starscape serves as the first of three extremely high-resolution images featured in the GigaGalaxy Zoom project, launched by ESO within the framework of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009). The plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, which we see edge-on from our perspective on Earth, cuts a luminous swath across the image. The projection used in GigaGalaxy Zoom place the viewer in front of our Galaxy with the Galactic Plane running horizontally through the image — almost as if we were looking at the Milky Way from the outside. From this vantage point, the general components of our spiral galaxy come clearly into view, including its disc, marbled with both dark and glowing nebulae, which harbours bright, young stars, as well as the Galaxy’s central bulge and its satellite galaxies. As filming extended over several months, objects from the Solar System came and went through the star fields, with bright planets such as Venus and Jupiter. For copyright reasons, we cannot provide here the full 800-million-pixel original image, which can be requested from Serge Brunier. The high resolution image provided here contains 18 million pixels.

Credit:

ESO/S. Brunier

Over de afbeelding

Id:eso0932a
Type:Fotografisch
Publicatiedatum:14 september 2009
Gerelateerde berichten:eso0932
Grootte:6000 x 3000 px

Over het object

Naam:Milky Way
Type:Milky Way
Afstand:25000 lichtjaren
Categorie:360 Panorama
Galaxies

Afbeeldingstypen

Grote JPEG
7,8 MB

Inzoomen


Achtergrond

1024x768
289,8 KB
1280x1024
526,9 KB
1600x1200
803,2 KB
1920x1200
958,8 KB
2048x1536
1,4 MB

Kleuren & filters

BandTelescoop
Other
N/A