NASA's Spitzer Telescope Brings 360-Degree View of Galaxy to Our Fingertips
Touring the Milky Way now is as easy as clicking a button with NASA's new zoomable, 360-degree mosaic presented Thursday at the TEDActive 2014 Conference in Vancouver, Canada.
The star-studded panorama of our galaxy is constructed from more than 2 million infrared snapshots taken over the past 10 years by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
"If we actually printed this out, we'd need a billboard as big as the Rose Bowl Stadium to display it," said Robert Hurt, an imaging specialist at NASA's Spitzer Space Science Center in Pasadena, Calif. "Instead, we've created a digital viewer that anyone, even astronomers, can use."
The 20-gigapixel mosaic uses Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope visualization platform. It captures about three percent of our sky, but because it focuses on a band around Earth where the plane of the Milky Way lies, it shows more than half of all the galaxy's stars.
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http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/news/1624-ssc2014-02-NASA-s-Spitzer-Telescope-Brings-360-Degree-View-of-Galaxy-to-Our-Fingertips
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/glimpse360
