IRAS/COBE Galactic Dust

This image shows the dramatically different view of our sky when viewed in far infrared light. At this wavelength of 100 microns, the light from stars is imperceptible against the cool glow of vast dust clouds warmed by the stars' light. In visible light such dust blocks our view of more distant stars and galaxies, but in far-infrared light it glows dramatically.

The dust in the Milky Way is mostly distributed in a disk that is very thin. This bright narrow band shows most of the dust in our galaxy. The fainter filaments above and below this disk represent only the very closest dust clouds as seen from our vantage point in the middle of this disk.

Several regions of interest are easily seen in this image. The bright knot of dust just above the Galactic Center (in the middle of the image) is the Rho Ophiuchus star forming region. The brightest of the three small, bright clouds just under the Galactic plane near the right edge is the Great Nebula in Orion. The two nearest companion galaxies to the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, are below the plane in the right third of the image.

The image has been constructed from data collected by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) and the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE). The two datasets have been merged and individual point sources have been removed to highlight the dust structures themselves. More information about this data can be found at:

http://astron.berkeley.edu/davis/dust/dust.html

This image is made from a single wavelength of light, but is presented in a pseudocolor mapping where different brightnesses are represented as different colors. The particular pseudocolor gradient used approximates the range of colors seen (in visible light) due to thermal emission at increasingly hot temperatures, but otherwise has no physical significance.

A second version of the image is also available in greyscale. This version may be used as-is or colored as desired (using, for instance, the "Gradient Map" feature in Photoshop).

Image Download Options

1200x600 pixels JPEG (390 K)
3000x1500 pixels JPEG (1.5 MB)
9100x4550 pixels JPEG (7.9 MB) TIFF(52.6 MB)

Greyscale version 1200x600 pixels JPEG (344 K) 9100x4550 pixels JPEG (2.6 MB) TIFF (11.2 MB)

Image Credit: IRAS/COBE

This image made use of Montage, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Earth Science Technology Office, Computational Technnologies Project, under Cooperative Agreement Number NCC5-626 between NASA and the California Institute of Technology