USNO A2.0 Catalog: A Digital Sky
Explanation:
Here lie 526,230,881 of the brightest stars known.
The
US Naval Observatory has deployed their monster
Precision Measuring Machine to digitize
photographic plates covering the whole sky and creating the
above map.
Yellow corresponds to 150,000 stars per square degree,
while dark blue corresponds to only 500 stars per
square degree.
(For comparison, the
Full Moon
takes up about 1/4 of a square degree.)
The most striking feature on this
whole sky projection is the
central disk of our
Milky Way Galaxy, which stretches across the middle.
Dark
dust
lanes are evident there by the
great number of stars they obscure.
The two bright spots seen south of the
Milky Way's disk are the neighboring
Magellanic Cloud galaxies.
Anyone can
order a free copy of this data,
but not everyone can fit data from all
526,230,881 stars on their hard-drive.
Authors & editors:
Robert Nemiroff
(MTU) &
Jerry Bonnell
(USRA)
NASA Web Site Statements, Warnings,
and Disclaimers
NASA Official: Jay Norris.
Specific
rights apply.
A service of:
LHEA at
NASA /
GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
