Core of the Milky Way

This sweeping panorama, 300 light-years in width, is the sharpest infrared picture ever made of the core of our Milky Way galaxy. It offers a nearby laboratory for how massive stars form and influence their environment in the often-violent nuclear regions of other galaxies. The galactic core is obscured in visible light by intervening dust clouds, but infrared light penetrates the dust. This view combines the sharp imaging of Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) with color imagery from a previous Spitzer Space Telescope survey done with its Infrared Astronomy Camera (IRAC). The NICMOS mosaic required 144 Hubble orbits to make 2,304 exposures.

Image Credit: NASA