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O.k. i selelcted this photo off the internet of someone snapping a photo of one of the milky way spiral arms in the night sky and so my question is ..... was the photo possibly a time released shot as i thought that we can't see any of the spiral arms with our naked eye correct?
If the photo isn't doctored, the blurring of the trees indicates a short time exposure, maybe five minutes. There may have been a wind, so I won't pin it closer than that. I'm not sure what you think is a spiral arm in the photo? Decent shot, BTW.
If the photo isn't doctored, the blurring of the trees indicates a short time exposure, maybe five minutes. There may have been a wind, so I won't pin it closer than that. I'm not sure what you think is a spiral arm in the photo? Decent shot, BTW.
Well the milky way is also hugely nebula and so looking at that photo and seeing what ''appears'' to be a spiraled look made me wonder if that was a time released photo shot of one of the distant arms some 30,000 light years away from us.
That's why i'm hoping that either NightBazaar or PITTS will come on here and educate me more about it and so anyway thanks for your thoughts about it .
Well the milky way is also hugely nebula and so looking at that photo and seeing what ''appears'' to be a spiraled look made me wonder if that was a time released photo shot of one of the distant arms some 30,000 light years away from us.
That's why i'm hoping that either NightBazaar or PITTS will come on here and educate me more about it and so anyway thanks for your thoughts about it .
I think I see what you're talking about regarding what appears to be a spiraled look. The brightest hazy band in the photo is the direction of the galactic center. Just to the right of it is a light band, which looks like part of a curving arm or spur that's partially obscured by the trees, but we're looking at dust and we're only seeing portion of whole thing. The reason it looks like it does is because the camera used doesn't have the magnification to bring out more detail. Below is an image from a different angle which shows much greater detail. I can see the same streaky patches of dust. I think if you rotated the picture in your link, you might see the same features. Part of the problem is that the photo in the link you posted, although it's very cool, shows less of it than in the image below. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...33a-07_rsz.jpg
O.k. i selelcted this photo off the internet of someone snapping a photo of one of the milky way spiral arms in the night sky and so my question is ..... was the photo possibly a time released shot as i thought that we can't see any of the spiral arms with our naked eye correct?
As far as I know you cannot see the spiral arms of our galaxy because we are imbedded in one of the spiral arms, within the galactic plane(disc); 26,000 light years from the galactic center......and much of the galaxy is obscured by dust....
In other words...... we have no direct way to see the arms because we cannot get images from above/below the galactic plane.
Here are some interesting links verifying my post and containing some interesting facts about our "home".
Nature of the Universe (http://www.physics.hku.hk/~nature/CD/regular_e/lectures/chap18.html - broken link)
As far as I know you cannot see the spiral arms of our galaxy because we are imbedded in one of the spiral arms, within the galactic plane(disc); 26,000 light years from the galactic center......and much of the galaxy is obscured by dust....
In other words...... we have no direct way to see the arms because we cannot get images from above/below the galactic plane.
That's right. You'd have to be a long way above or below the galactic plane to see the arms. From our position in the galaxy, we can't directly see them because of all the gas and dust. Our solar system is thought to be located in a spur called the Orion Spur, between a couple of major arms. As far as I can tell, the Milky Way is either a spiral galaxy or a barred spiral galaxy. Based on evidence collected by the Spitzer Space Telescope, it's probably a barred spiral galaxy. A Map of the Milky Way
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