Starship Asterisk*

About 2 1/2 inches in at the bottom left, and about an inch up, is a yellowish object.
Is it me, or does the object look like Mr. Potato Head???
It has goofy eyes, a small nose and a frowning mouth, and small ears!!!
Odd little thing!

Following the arch of bright clouds containing the mentioned pillars in the lower left corner from left to right you find a bright object which looks like beeing sourrounded by a sphere of gas.Panning right (2050px form left, 2180px from top) you find a saturn look-alike object. What is it?

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090107.html

Galactic Center Survey
NASA News Release STScI-PRC09-02a - 2009 Jan 05
Hubble NICMOS / Spitzer IRAC

• This composite color infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy reveals a new population of massive stars and new details in complex structures in the hot ionized gas swirling around the central 300 light-years. This sweeping panorama is the sharpest infrared picture ever made of the Galactic core. It offers a nearby laboratory for how massive stars form and influence their environment in the often violent nuclear regions of other galaxies.
  
  This view combines the sharp imaging of the Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) with color imagery from a previous Spitzer Space Telescope survey done with its Infrared Astronomy Camera (IRAC). The Galactic core is obscured in visible light by intervening dust clouds, but infrared light penetrates the dust.
  

Very interesting. The comment on Saturn plus the text "objects less than 20x our solar system are discernible" got me wondering how it would look if HST and Spitzer took a similar shot from Galactic centre towards our solar system ? I guess we are surrounded by similarly much gas and dust and stars.

Any APOD posted yet which might represent such an image ?

Ciao/Amateur

Amateur wrote:Very interesting. The comment on Saturn plus the text "objects less than 20x our solar system are discernible" got me wondering how it would look if HST and Spitzer took a similar shot from Galactic centre towards our solar system ? I guess we are surrounded by similarly much gas and dust and stars.

No, we're not. A view of our region from the galactic center would look much like images we take from here towards most other parts of the sky. The density of material (and stars) near the center of the Milky Way is much higher than it is out here towards the edge.

Dust and gas also concentrate along shock boundaries, but we aren't currently near any. Our region of space is pretty clear of dust, and the star density isn't very high, either.

Amateur wrote:Any APOD posted yet which might represent such an image ?

Any such pictures would of necessity be artist interpretations only! Unless, of course, our galactic center neighbors sent us pictures.

Oh right, like that one I got just the other day

bystander wrote:

Amateur wrote:Any APOD posted yet which might represent such an image ?

Any such pictures would of necessity be artist interpretations only! Unless, of course, our galactic center neighbors sent us pictures.

Looking at this region (The massive Central Cluster of stars surrounding Sagittarius A* is visible on the lower right) it is clear to see the area directly influenced by the SMBH at the galactic center by the ammount of Hot swirling gas that is creating an apparent vortex in this area.

HMS wrote:Following the arch of bright clouds containing the mentioned pillars in the lower left corner from left to right you find a bright object which looks like beeing sourrounded by a sphere of gas.Panning right (2050px form left, 2180px from top) you find a saturn look-alike object. What is it?

I think you are right. A star heating up a sphere of gas. Like a small planetary nebula. Since this is an infra-red photo.

Can anyone tell me the names of more of the objects in the picture. Names of Stars, etc.... I am trying to identify the region of space in Starry Night.
Thanks,
Boomer12k

Boomer12k wrote: Can anyone tell me the names of more of the objects in the picture. Names of Stars, etc.... I am trying to identify the region of space in Starry Night.

ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cosmic/data/mar ... an2rot.gif
ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cosmic/galcente ... CD.med.jpg
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap971111.html

Have fun! But why is it whenever I try to align the various GC pictures from the various sources (f.e, PIA03653 with the present gcenter_hstspitzer), I really can't, ie. the alignment is only ever good locally, but never over all of the overlapping image area. Almost as if there's a minute non-uniform transformation in the image ... Would this be just because the images are actually composites of many sub-exposures and actually *do* have some misalignment of their own (though I don't see why it wouldn't be processed away 'at the factory')? Of course, I can't trust my scalings between the images too much, as the areas spanned are usually reported somewhat vaguely ... it'd be fantastic if the relevant (location) data came with headers of these files.

--
jussi