NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope gives us an awesome 360-degree view of the galaxy

NASA recently released this new video, showing a 360-degree pan of the Milky Way Galaxy, as seen by their Spitzer Space Telescope. Take a look above. It's just incredible.

Spitzer is an infrared telescope, meaning that it sees wavelengths of light that are too long for human eyes to see. Looking at these wavelengths, the telescope essentially picks up the heat being given off by objects in space (stars, planets, asteroids, dust, etc), and it provides us with a view of the galaxy that just isn't possible with normal, visible-light telescopes. This is due to the abundant interstellar dust particles in the spiral arms of the galaxy. This dust tends to absorb visible wavelengths of light, so it prevents us from seeing things inside the dust or beyond it (and sometimes we can't even see the dust itself). However, infrared light slips through this dust much easier, and the dust gives off infrared light too (if it has something heating it up). With Spitzer out there, trailing after Earth in our orbit, to collect this light for us, we can not only see where all this dust is, but we can peer beyond it as well.

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If you want a closer look at this 'cool' infrared view of our galaxy, the team at JPL and Caltech put together GLIMPSE360, a zoomable 360-degree mosaic image that you can pan around in at your leisure.

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