The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Earth receives picture postcard of Milky Way

Spiral galaxy bears uncanny resemblance to our own home

Cloud storage: Lower cost and increase uptime

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have agreeably given we Earthlings a pretty good idea of what our Milky Way galaxy would look like, were we looking at it from the depths of intergalactic space.

The ESO describes its snap of NGC 6744 as "almost a picture postcard" of our home, featuring "striking spiral arms wrapping around a dense, elongated nucleus and a dusty disc":

ESO image of NGC 6744

NGC 6744 is actually almost twice the 100,000 light-year width of the Milky Way, and extends "about two-thirds the width of the full Moon" across the Earthly heavens. ESO describes it as "one of the most beautiful objects in the southern sky".

The impressive photo was grabbed by "the Wide Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2 metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile". ESO elaborates: The picture was created from exposures taken through four different filters that passed blue, yellow-green and red light and the glow coming from hydrogen gas. These are shown in this picture as blue, green, orange and red, respectively." ®

Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

So where's the ...

"You are Here" arrow?

(and the "Your luggage is over here" arrow)

11
0

And if you just look closely...

at the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm, you can just see where they are building the Hyperspace bypass. They need to get rid of that insignificant little blue-green planet though.

5
0

"All we are is dust in the wind dude!" - Bill & Ted

Hmmmm

5
0

More from The Register

Boffins find evidence Atlantic Ocean has started closing
'Embryonic subduction zone' that flattened Lisbon headed for Blighty
Google launches broadband balloons, radio astronomy frets
A careless Loon could blind the square kilometre array
New material enables 1,000-meter super-skyscrapers
Before you read on, see if you can guess how the new stuff will be used
 breaking news
You've seen the Large Hadron Collider. Now comes the HUGE Hadron Collider
International Linear Collider ready to rock and roll
Headbangers have a gas, gas, gas in mosh pits
Boffins say heavy metal crowds behave like The Vapours
Hubble spies unlikely planet being born in hostile neighborhood
Hoovering a cloud of sand 7.5 billion miles from a tiny star
 breaking news
Jaguar to open new car-making factory in Blighty (virtually)
Britain still makes stuff, it's just not real any more...
 breaking news
China's second woman 'naut blasts off for coupling in HEAVEN
Wang and pals test the cosmic waters for Chinese space station
Scientists investigate 'dark lightning' threat to aircraft passengers
One stormy flight could give lifetime radiation dose
 breaking news
Chinese 'nauts prep for next coupling in Heaven, clear way for new station
Second woman taikonaut and pals test tech for China's own orbiting platform