Digital Universe Guide - Hayden Planetarium
Digital Universe Guide - Hayden Planetarium
Digital Universe Guide - Hayden Planetarium
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3.3. MILKY WAY DATA GROUPS 119<br />
3.3.26 Two Micron (2MASS) All-Sky Survey<br />
Group Name mw2MASS<br />
Reference Two Micron All-Sky Survey<br />
(UMass, IPAC/CalTech, NASA, NSF)<br />
Prepared by Tom Jarrett (IPAC/CalTech),<br />
Brian Abbott (AMNH/<strong>Hayden</strong>)<br />
Labels No<br />
Files mw-2mass.speck<br />
Dependencies mw-2mass-1024.sgi<br />
Wavelength 1.24, 1.66, 2.16 microns<br />
Frequency 241,936, 180,723, 138,889 GHz<br />
The Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) is an infrared (IR) survey of the sky. Because it is looking in<br />
the IR and this is a composite of the 2MASS point-source catalog, most of the light from this survey is<br />
starlight. In visible light, clouds of gas and dust obscure our view. However, in IR the longer wavelengths<br />
of light can penetrate these clouds without being scattered, thereby revealing stars that would normally<br />
be hidden to our eye.<br />
The 2MASS data were taken over 1,400 nights from 1997 to 2001 with two, 1.3-meter telescopes<br />
located on Mt. Hopkins, Arizona, and Cerro Tololo, Chile. Each telescope had identical IR detectors that<br />
could observe light at 1.24, 1.66, and 2.16 micron wavelengths. The 2MASS Image Atlas contains more<br />
than 4 million images in these wavelengths that cover 99.998% of the sky.<br />
The 2MASS image contains many point sources. If you turn up the image’s brightness (using the<br />
Alpha Slider) and turn off the stars, you will see many of the stars in the image align with the<br />
constellation outlines. Many of the stars, particularly cooler stars, shine in the infrared. If you look<br />
toward Orion, you’ll see many of the hotter stars in that constellation are not visible or as bright.<br />
Conversely, Betelgeuse, the red giant, is bright, radiating much of its light in the infrared.<br />
The Galaxy itself is quite prominent, with the bright disk and the Galactic bulge toward the center of<br />
the Milky Way and virtually no disk showing toward Orion, away from Galactic center. Clouds of gas and<br />
dust are also apparent and are a brownish color, correlating exactly with the carbon monoxide all-sky<br />
survey (mwCO group). You will see some distortion artifacts toward the Galactic poles. This is from the<br />
process of wrapping the image on a sphere.<br />
Few features pop out as they do on other surveys. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are<br />
visible, as is the glow of the Pleiades star cluster, but beyond these, the survey is mainly starlight.