Friday, September 27, 2013

our fluffy universe

this image from ivan eder featured on APOD this week, shows the beautiful galaxy pair of M81 (left) and M82.   turns out if you expose a photo long enough, the universe looks a bit fuzzy!  

galaxies M81 and M82 through the milky way's haze (Credit: Ivan Eder

the fuzzy stuff that appears to be floating the space in the image is not associated with those galaxies at all.   after exposing for 25 hours, the photographer managed to capture the faint glow of the cirrus dust clouds in our own milky way galaxy.   beautiful!   

1 comment:

Sakib said...

These high latitude dust clouds seem to be everywhere in the Milky Way. If you do a really long exposure of many different northern and southern regions of the sky, it shows up.