NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer Takes Pretty Pictures

Yesterday NASA started releasing pictures from their latest orbital telescope, WISE. WISE is an infrared telescope that’s doing a whole-sky survey. It’s also looking for near-earth objects, asteroids, and comets. This thing is extremely sensitive — it’s about 100 times more sensitive than previous infrared telescopes — and it’s taking a lot of pictures. A lot of pictures, more than new parents who’ve just bought a DSLR. It’s taking a picture every 11 seconds, and will end up with some 1.5 million pictures over its ten month life.

So how do the pictures look?

Infrared picture of the Andromeda Galaxy taken by the WISE telescope

That’s the Andromeda galaxy, some 2,500,000 light years away. And there’s plenty more space porn where that came from.

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4 Comments

  1. Seth Vidal
    on February 19, 2010 at 3:48 am | Permalink

    Hmm, That’s not what I thought I was going to get when I automatically clicked on ‘space porn’.

    oh well…

  2. on February 19, 2010 at 2:54 pm | Permalink

    Who do you think I am, Warren Ellis?

  3. Seth Vidal
    on February 19, 2010 at 3:24 pm | Permalink

    you do have a passing similarity to spider jerusalem…

    does that count?

  4. on February 19, 2010 at 3:25 pm | Permalink

    Red and green glasses, here I come!

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