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Corey S Powell (coreyspowell@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 02-Jun-2025 06:01:50 JST Corey S Powell

Nature presents us with 80 "octaves" of light, of which humans can see exactly 1.
Bringing the other 79 octaves into view has taken two centuries of effort, but it has transformed our ability to sense our place in the cosmic order.
My new essay in Aeon magazine:
https://aeon.co/essays/william-herschels-sensors-let-us-see-the-invisible-universe #space #science #nature #tech
In conversation about 21 days ago from mastodon.social permalink
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1. This is a mosaic of the images covering the entire sky as observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), part of its All-Sky Data Release. The sky can be thought of as a sphere that surrounds us in three dimensions. To make a map of the sky, astronomers project it into two dimensions. Many different methods can be used to project a spherical surface into a 2-D map. The projection used in this image of the sky, called Aitoff, takes the 3-D sky sphere and slices open one hemisphere, and then flattens the whole thing out into an oval shape. In the mosaic, the Milky Way Galaxy runs horizontally across this map. The Milky Way is shaped like a disk and our solar system is located in that disk about two-thirds of the way out from the center. So we see the Milky Way as a band running through the sky. As we look toward the center of the galaxy, we are looking through more of the disk than when we are looking at large angles away from the center, and you can see a noticeable increase in stars (colored blue-green) toward the center of the image.
  https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/610/049/708/696/493/original/c2a3b23c0416e518.jpg

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