Multimedia Gallery
Dust Clouds in Milky Way Plane
Dust Clouds in Milky Way Plane
Dust clouds in the plane of the Milky Way, running diagonally from upper left to lower right.
This three-color mosaic, produced by Montage on San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) TeraGrid resources, is from observations in the 2MASS all-sky survey. With 10,000 individual pixels on a side, the mosaic gives astronomers a view vastly expanded in both detail and width, opening the door to new insights into the large-scale structure of the Milky Way.
This image is one of a set of uniform mosaics that span the entire sky, one of the largest derived data products ever produced. The National Virtual Observatory-supported collaboration with the SDSC and the Montage project at Caltech/IPAC began with some 10 terabytes (trillion bytes) of observations from the 2MASS all-sky survey. Running the Montage mosaicking software on large-scale SDSC TeraGrid computer and data resources produced thousands of mosaics that cover the sky, including the three-color image shown here. To learn more, see the TeraGrid News story The Big Picture: Massive Mosaics Let Astronomers See the Whole. (Date of Image: 2005 and 2006)
Credit: Image courtesy Montage, IPAC, Caltech, SDSC
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