how did hubble telescope take pictures of the milky way when its in it?

Question

i always found this interesting. how can a telescope thats in the milky way take pictures of the milky way as a whole! especially when we still dont have clear pictures of pluto.

Answer 1

It didn't take external pictures obviously , but you can still take pictures of the inside of your house and work out what shape it is. You'd also get a pretty good idea of what it looked like fron the outside.

Answer 2

I never saw that presentation so I don't know what the picture looked like. If the picture just shows lots of stars, like a handfull of salt thrown on a black floor, then this is easy, anybody with a manual camera can do this, even easier if you fix the camera to a telescope. If however the picture shows a spiral galaxy, you know the sort, looks like a pinwheel firework, then Hubble did not take it, the camera would have to be a million light years away and it would take a zillion years to send the camera that far away, so it might just be a photo of another galaxy, like Andromeda, that looks a lot like ours. If you saw one of those mega zoom movies, where the camera starts with a close up photo of Earth then slowly backs away till you see the whole solar system then eventually the whole of the milky way spiral galaxy then you are watching a computor simulation, quite accurate but not a photo Hope this helps Cheers, Alan

Answer 3

The Hubble has not taken a picture of the Milky Way as a whole...and contrary to other answers, it has not even taken a complete mosaic of the Milky Way as it appears in our sky. Other telescopes have though...The Spitzer infrared space telescope has done it.

By the way, we don't have clear pictures of Pluto because it appears very small in the sky. We don't have clear pictures of *anything* which appears that small. The things we do have clear pictures of, in fact, appear very much larger than Pluto does.

Answer 4

It is called a galaxy mosaic. They use the best telescopes to take pictures of all the different parts of the galaxy, then getting experts to put the together and they will get a what is sopposed to be a picture of the milkyway galaxy as seen from above.
It is not always accurate but its the best method they've got so far.

Also some pictures are acually 3D artist's concepts of what they think it would look like (according to studies). And since we know that our galaxy is a spiral-shaped one, somethimes they compare it with other spiral galaxies that are said to look similar to the milky way.

Answer 5

The milky way is billions of kilometers from us. Its actually the galaxy that we live in and we are viewing it from the outer edge. The hubble telescope is only a few hundred kilometers above the earths surface. You might want to read up a bit on outer space, I think.

Answer 6

The same way you can take pix of the barn walls when standing inside the barn.

You may be referring to some of those spectacular pix of Milky Way like galaxies, the ones with the swirling look. Those are not the MW, but they look like our galaxy. Being outside and very far from those look alikes, we can get an idea of what our own Milky Way must look like.

Answer 7

Check this space later... I will find some actual pics of the milky way when I get a chance to. There is a pics of the galaxy taken from in the plane of the MW, but no external pics... just similar looking galaxies.

Photos of the MW taken from the plane that we exist in... you cannot see any spiral arms, just a plane of stars. We are inside one of the peripheral spirals

http://www.motodom.com/MilkyWay.jpg

Answer 8

It doesn't, when you see photos of entire galaxies, they are not of the MilkyWay just similar looking galaxies.

Answer 9

It doesn't, it takes pics of other spiral galaxies, not ours. You are looking at artist's renditions of ours.

Answer 10

Good question, it's the government! I'm telling you there are aliens out there, and they are in cohabs w/ our government., but you didn't hear it from me *cough* Cough* *she disappears*