The Hubble and Spitzer telescopes produced this color mosaic of the Galactic Center. Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, known as NICMOS, made 2,304 exposures during 144 Hubble orbits for the mosaic. The false-color image was taken through a filter than reveals the glow of hot hydrogen in space. (NASA, ESA and Q.D. Wang, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
A camera developed by a University of Arizona-led team for the Hubble Space Telescope has helped produce an infrared mosaic image that is the sharpest infrared picture ever made of a large area at the center of our Milky Way.
The image shows the sweeping panorama of a new population of massive stars and new details in complex structures in the hot ionized gas swirling within 300 light-years of the Galactic center.
The new view combines the sharp imaging of the Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, or NICMOS, with color imagery from a previous Spitzer Space Telescope survey done with its Infrared Astronomy Camera.
The NICMOS mosaic image represents the largest piece of sky ever mapped for one NICMOS observing program. It was combined with a full-color Spitzer image to yield a color composite of the nuclear region. The picture measures 300 by 115 light-years and details objects as small as 20 times the size of our own solar system.
Glenn Schneider of the UA Steward Observatory, who is the NICMOS instrument scientist and a co-investigator on the project that produced the image, is at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long, Beach, Calif., where the image was released today.
The NICMOS mosaic required 144 Hubble orbits to make 2,304 exposures. The NICMOS images were taken between Feb. 22 and June 5, 2008.
The Space Telescope Science Institute has posted more information about the new image at its Web site.
NICMOS is a $100 million space instrument conceived, designed and built by the UA under contract from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. UA astronomy professor Rodger Thompson, principal investigator for NICMOS, spearheaded the effort that began in 1984.
When space shuttle astronauts installed NICMOS on the Hubble Space Telescope in 1997, the instrument was the first large-array detector camera in space. Astronauts installed a new closed-cycle cryocooler on Hubble during a March 2002 servicing mission to keep NICMOS operating.
Glenn Schneider
Rodger I. Thompson
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