|Posted on Aug 26, 2008 03:52:47 PM | Steve Ritz | 0 Comments ||
First Light!We had our first-light press teleconference this
afternoon. You can find the information and the slides here. The
gorgeous full-sky image, based only on about 95 hours of the
first engineering data is shown below, and here is a link to
higher-resolution versions (with annotation and without
annotation). Because we look in all directions, it's a bit
challenging to map all those directions onto a flat screen or
piece of paper. The image you see is an unrolling and flattening
of the whole sky. If you prefer to see the whole "globe", there
is a movie here. That bright band is our own milkyway galaxy
glowing brightly in gamma rays. The brightly flaring object
billions of light years away, 3C454.3, mentioned in the previous
post, is the bright source in the lower left side of the image.
This is what we saw just opening our eyes and taking a first
glimpse of the universe with this wonderful new facility, and it
is comparable with the image