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 centre 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. Happy Friday! [Space.com via The Daily What]
Richard
Sunday, December 6, 2009 at 8:39 PMIt would be nice to see this in 3D so we could have a sense of depth.
Vision Hawk
Sunday, December 6, 2009 at 11:02 PMDear Adam,
No need to feel insignificant. We are ALL necessary in the scheme of things. Maybe a bit overwhelmed at times, but never insignificant. Feel the rightness of what I am saying?
Good life to you…..
Ben Dy
Monday, December 7, 2009 at 1:28 PMWhere can I download the full size pic? ;D
cedley
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 11:09 PM800,000 pictures, 2.5 billion pixels and that’s not good enough, you want it in 3d?! What is wrong with people?
You’d need a supercomputer just to image it, if the field of depth was in proportion to the size of the image you’d be looking at 125,000,000,000,000 pixels beings displayed simultaneously in real time!