Milky Way in hydrogen glory
One of the losers in STFC's cuts is the Issac Newton Group of Telescopes on La Palma which, I think, are now having their planned closure accelerated (perhaps someone who knows better can confirm that). Given these events, yesterday saw the release of the first part of a huge survey of the Milky Way by the Wide-Field Camera on the 2.5 m Issac Newton Telescope (INT). The section of the survey chosen for the press release shows a central part of the Rosette Nebula (NGC 2244) and is pretty stunning.
Centre of the Rosette Nebula, as imaged in Hydrogen alpha emission in the IPHAS survey. CREDIT: Nick Wright, University College London/IPHAS
The data release yesterday is of the northern plane of the Milky Way galaxy and covers around 1600 square degrees. Once the rest of the survey is released that should go up to about 4000 square degrees! Another exciting thing about this data is that it has been integrated into the Virtual Observatory - an international effort by astronomers to provide easy access to many huge astronomical surveys and databases.
You can use the IPHAS survey's swishy flash-based interface to search by object name (e.g enter something like "Eagle Nebula") or by position on the sky. The 'Postage Stamp' option gives a nice interface to the images and is clearly inspired by the album art display in iTunes! The only problem I had was after having tried searching for NGC 7027, then searching for the Eagle Nebula only to find NGC 7027 popping up; it may be geeky of me to say but I recognised it from the r filter image so knew it wasn't the Eagle Nebula. Despite these minor quirks, it looks like a pretty nice front-end to a vast optical survey of our galaxy.
Comments: Milky Way in hydrogen glory
Dear Stuart and members/readers of Astroblog,
This is a Press Release, as well as a comment on this story.
I must say that I am very impressed by the graphical image of the Rosette Nebula. I wish I had had access to such an image three months ago. One thing that was not discussed in this story was the possible origins of a structure as beautiful as nebulae. Perhaps I can be of assistance in that matter.
Judging from your very informative and science-driven website you are individual that I need to contact You and individuals with whom you are in contact are people who will be able to understand, critique, and hopefully find a fundamental fault with the new model that I have just developed and published. The model is the result of the repercussions sprouting from one theoretical question: What if matter and antimatter gravitationally repel? Using formal deductive principles, from that one introduced axiom comes prediction and explanation for almost all of the unexplainable "anomalous" phenomena of the observable Universe, including nebulae formation, the driver of the solar wind, supermassive central galactic black-holes (with an explanation for why these giants stopped growing when they did), the uniform mass distribution, identification of the nature of "dark matter," and much more.
Sound too good to be true? Maybe it is. The most ominous of all of this new modelâ™s implications is that mini black-holes are expected to be stable. This is of acute concern because there is currently a world-wide race between laboratories (LHC, Brookhaven, and others) to be the first to "successfully" create, document, and study synthetic black-hole material. Their success could therefore mean our doom.
Please check out this new model (you'd probably want the hardcover because it contains twice the analysis of the kindle-book version). Its title is âœThe Dominiumâ and author is Hasanuddin, and it is currently available through online bookstores (at least that is true from the USA, the UK might be a day or two behind because this is truly breaking news and the point of publication is the USA). I hope that you might be able to find a fault with either the scientific foundations used or the logical progression employed. If you can find such a fault, then there is not reason for concern with current activities under way in Switzerland. If, however, you can find no such fault... please help get the word out. Time is limited
Sincerely,
Hasanuddin
Posted by Hasanuddin on Friday 14th Dec 2007 (15:55 UTC)
Just to be briefly selfish, I should point out that the swishy interface is not just vaguely "integrated with the VO" but actually constructed by the UK AstroGrid project (PI yours truly; all the hard work done by Eduardo Gonzalez in Cambridge). This is of course one of the things in the STFC Delivery Plan, which while not actually ceasing, is marked for review as to whether we can continue investing....
Posted by Andy Lawrence on Friday 14th Dec 2007 (21:37 UTC)
Hasanuddin, I tend to think that if you were serious about your idea you would have written it as a scientific paper and submitted it to a real peer review process rather than sell it for 28.50 dollars on Amazon.
Please make sure that you've read Cosmic Variance's Alternative Science Checklist.
Posted by Stuart on Friday 14th Dec 2007 (21:53 UTC)