As inhabitants of a flat galactic disk, Earth and its solar system have an edge-on view of their host galaxy, like looking at a glass dish from its edge. From our perspective, most of the galaxy is condensed into a blurry narrow band of light that stretches completely around the sky, also known as the galactic plane.The image is composed of over 800,000 separate images, each of them hi-res, each likely showing more detail than your average desktop wallpaper. Aside from the mosaic at Adler, the images will also allow astronomers to do statistical searches, estimate populations of objects and evaluate the contexts of celestial objects.
The main event (click to embiggen, then click again via magnifying glass to double-embiggen):
Pretty neat stuff. So what does this telescope mean for astronomy? What can we now find out from it about the Milky Way Galaxy that couldn't get before?
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