How can they take a picture of the Milky Way Galaxy?

Question

I'm really into Earth & Space Science & have been reading alot of books for years now & the books have pictures of our Milky Way Galaxy in them.
How is Possible to take a picture of the Mily Way, when it would take like Millions of years just for the Space probe to reach a certain point to where it could snap an entire photo for it?
I think that they just make it up, & the Milky Way doesnt even look like that at all

Answer 1

Kentrell, I want you to look at this Nova website, and to watch these videos, OK? I did, and was quite impressed with them. they use infrared X-ray telescopes to look to the center of our Milky Way galaxy, with very clear images!!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blackhole/program.html

I believe you will like these, will learn from them!

Answer 2

Since our solar system is embedded within our Galaxy, we can only show an artist's representation of what our Galaxy looks like from the outside, rather than show a true astronomical image, as produced by a telescope. From our vantage point in the plane of the Galaxy we only have an edge-on view of the Milky Way, but this view is still very useful, especially when combining information from different types of astronomical observations. Some observations are good for tracing the spiral arms of our Galaxy, while others are better for detecting the stars and still others are good for tracing the gas and dust. A picture of the Milky Way, as seen from the outside, can then be made by piecing together the information from these different observations.

Answer 3

You can take a picture by just mounting your camera on a tripod, pointing it at the Milky Way in the sky, and taking a long time exposure, several seconds long at least. Maybe a minute. You need to be in a dark enough place where you can actually see the Milky Way, which means outside of the city and away from streetlights.

Of course you will see it from the inside. We do not know for sure what it would look like from outside, but we have some idea based on what other galaxies look like and what we can see of the Milky Way from our location inside it.

Answer 4

The television series "Cosmos" had brilliant visuals. Most of which were animations, as I recall, and were not represented as actual photographs. Pictures of actual galaxies aren't that hard to come by. There is this thing called the Hubble space telescope. It sits in orbit around the Earth, and is dedicated to taking fantastic pictures of deep space objects. I don't know why you seem so skeptical about such things. If the series "Cosmos" had featured a sequence showing that space telescopes can take spy pictures of your neighbors for a government conspiracy to keep alien visitations secret, I imagine you'd have no problem believing the lot of it. And how is it that the Mars rover sending pictures wirelessly to Earth is unbelievable, while 10 year old kids sending pictures wirelessly from cell phones seems mundane? And why is it that people think that the government does evil, conspiratorial things to perfection, while at the same time believing that government is incompetent to do even simple things like taking an innocent photograph?

Answer 5

Well, NASA should have hire you for the job. It seems that you think you already know everything. Here's something you may not know:

Approximate positions of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy can be estimated by the red shift factor of the light from burning hydrogen gas in the stars. A 3d image of these stars can be put in a computer and viewed from any coordinate. There are no "pictures" of the Milky Way galaxy from outside of it. Just computer images. They were not "made up".

Answer 6

We can take pictures of other galaxies, and using the information we know about the Milky Way Galaxy, we can make a guess as to what it looks like, and maybe be fairly accurate since we've observed so much. Books will have pictures based on that information in them. There aren't any photographic pictures of it, unless somebody in another galaxy took it.

Answer 7

We use a data from various sources to construct an image of the milky way. Nothing can take a picture of it from the outside, and nobody every claims to have done so.

Sometimes you will see pictures of galaxies that we presume to be similar in shape to the Milky Way galaxy.

Answer 8

By obtaining images in all directions, it is possible to construct a model of the entire system. Think of it as standing in a field and taking pictures as you turn. They can be combined to form a 3D image of the whole.

Answer 9

i think they take different pictures of our galaxy form probes in our solar system so then it's easy to imagine how it looks