Picture of ‘Milky Way’, our home galaxy ?

For the FIRST TIME, you will now be able to view photos of other galactic wonders. These photos were not provided by NASA, the European Space Agency, nor any other ‘terrestrial’ space agency. Of particular interest will be the photo depicting a galaxy as a ‘blue spiral’. If that photo seems familiar (which it may appear to some), it should -- it is the ‘Milky Way’, our home galaxy, as seen from a distance of ’10 light years’.

Certainly, that photo alone was not taken by the Hubble telescope, nor by any other probe or technology we currently have available.

web.mac.com...

I believe this website dares to claim it has a picture posted that shows our own ‘Milky Way’ taken from a distance of 10 light years.
There are a few pictures of galaxies on this website and i am not realy sure wich one is depicting our ‘Milky Way’
There is one that looks most like a ‘blue spiral’ so i gues that must be the one.

What i find strange is that the autor of the website does not specificly name our galaxy in his picture gallery.
I mean it should be the most importand of his gallery right.

Anyways, i just thought i should share this and see what you all think.

Originally posted by jaamaan
Anyways, i just thought i should share this and see what you all think.

It's utter garbage, and his website slowed my computer to a crawl for several minutes. 10 light years? What's he smoking? You know what our galaxy would look like at a distance of "10 light years"? This:
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov...
Yes, it would basically look exactly the way it does to us here on earth; 10 light years is nothing in galactic terms. If you went 10 light years out of the plane of the milkyway your perspective shift would be nill.

He's a plagiarist to boot, as he claims all photos on his site are his copyrighted work. Bull - I'd really like to see him try to enforce that "copyright" back on NASA for using "his" work without permission, or on me for reposting it here without his permission. He claims the photo doesn't come from NASA. Also bull.

It's an illustration, not a photo, and it comes from NASA/JPL and caltech according to this story about it:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech)
www.news.wisc.edu...
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov...

You can clearly tell in the APOD higher res version that it's an illustration, not a photograph. This illustration of our galaxy is based on a survey from the spitzer space telescope, which found that our galaxy is actually a barred spiral.

[edit on 2-5-2008 by ngchunter]

Originally posted by ngchunter
It's utter garbage, and his website slowed my computer to a crawl for several minutes. 10 light years? What's he smoking? You know what our galaxy would look like at a distance of "10 light years"? This:
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov...
Yes, it would basically look exactly the way it does to us here on earth; 10 light years is nothing in galactic terms. If you went 10 light years out of the plane of the milkyway your perspective shift would be nill.

Thank you for the answers.
When i think of it, 10 klightyears is indeed nothing compared to the scale of a galaxy.

The region pictured here is immense, with a horizontal span of 890 light-years and a vertical span of 640 light-years. Earth is located 26,000 light-years away, out in one of the Milky Way's spiral arms. Though most of the objects seen in this image are located at the galactic center, the features above and below the galactic plane tend to lie closer to Earth.
www.spitzer.caltech.edu...

How can they get a picture of the Milky Way galaxy from outside the galaxy anyway...

reply to post by Shadow_Lord


The short is answer is... they can't. It's just an illustration, a simulation of what our galaxy might look like as viewed face-on in a telescope a million light years away. This illustration was based on a survey of 30 million stars in our galaxy as seen from earth orbit with an infrared telescope. They used that information to create an approximation of what our galaxy looks like.

reply to post by ngchunter


Sorry, I was being sarcastic I just thought it was odd that the site was claiming such an ability.