A zoomable panorama from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows us our galaxy's plane all the way around us in infrared light.
A zoomable panorama from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows us our galaxy's plane all the way around us in infrared light. The 360-degree mosaic comes primarily from the GLIMPSE360 project, which stands for Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire. It consists of more than 2 million snapshots taken in infrared light over 10 years, beginning in 2003 when Spitzer launched.
GLIMPSE News Updates
- March 20th, 2014 | ssc2014-02
NASA's Spitzer Telescope Brings 360-Degree View of Galaxy to Our Fingertips
- June 3rd, 2008 | ssc2008-11
Spitzer Captures Stellar Coming of Age in Our Galaxy
World Wide Telescope
Use Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope viewer to view the image in context and cross-fade to the visible-light sky.
Aladin Viewer
CDS Aladin Lite viewer offers shortcuts to regions of interest and image exporting.
Poster
Download the full resolution poster file for printing.
- GLIMPSE360 Poster • tif • 306mb • 24,000 x 14,500
Planetarium Systems
These files assemble the GLIMPSE360 image in a single all-sky equirectangular projection. The resolution is vastly reduced from the native image scale, but the files should be easily incorporated into any software that renders a spherical sky dome from a single image.
The images are in galactic equirectangular coordinates centered at l, b = 0, 0. The files have an embedded alpha channel to facilitate compositing the GLIMPSE360 survey against other all-sky datasets.
- All Sky 8k • tif • 2mb • 8,192 x 4,096
- All Sky 24k • tif • 18mb • 24,575 x 12,288
Raw Data Files
The raw data files are very big. These images will not display properly in a browser, its best to right click and 'save link as' when downloading.
These source files each span 45 x 10 degrees and are in galactic coordinates using an equirectangular projection. They are all centered on galactic latitude of 0, and the final digits in the file names indicate the center galactic longitude of each tile.
- Longitude 000 • tif • 1.38gb • 67,500 x 15,000
- Longitude 045 • tif • 1.11gb • 67,500 x 15,000
- Longitude 090 • tif • 780mb • 67,500 x 15,000
- Longitude 135 • tif • 511mb • 67,500 x 15,000
- Longitude 180 • tif • 520mb • 67,500 x 15,000
- Longitude 225 • tif • 468mb • 67,500 x 15,000
- Longitude 270 • tif • 765mb • 67,500 x 15,000
- Longitude 315 • tif • 947mb • 67,500 x 15,000
A new panorama from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows us our galaxy's plane all the way around us in infrared light.
Welcome home! This is our Milky Way galaxy as you’ve never seen it before. Ten years in the making, this is the clearest infrared panorama of our galactic home ever made, courtesy of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
This video shows a continually looping view of the Spitzer Space Telescope's new infrared view of our Milky Way Galaxy.
More than 800,000 frames from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope were stitched together to create this infrared portrait of dust and stars radiating in the inner Milky Way.
More than 444,580 frames from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope were stitched together to create this portrait of the raging star-formation occurring in the inner Milky Way.
Two and a half billion infrared pixels are exposing our own Galaxy in this new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope!
Touring the Milky Way now is as easy as clicking a button with NASA's new zoomable, 360-degree mosaic presented Thursday at the TED 2014 Conference in Vancouver, Canada.
