Hello again, and apologies for the rather lengthy gap in posting. I’m going to try to resume writing at a reasonable frequency.
As a welcome back gift, here’s a view of the centre of our Milky Way galaxy recently released by NASA to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy:
The centre of the Milky Way. Click to enlarge (2.8 MB). Credit: NASA, ESA, SSC, CXC, and STScI.
The picture is a composite of images taken by three space telescopes: infrared from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes, and an X-ray view from Chandra. The X-rays are shown here in blue, with the red and orange being far and near infrared respectively. So the orange represents light whose wavelength is just a little bit too long for humans to see, red is quite a bit longer, and blue is extremely short.
