by Anthony Barreiro » Thu Mar 13, 2014 9:36 pm
quigley wrote:Gorgeous image. Makes me wish I could go there to see it first hand out of the window of a starship. Since this galaxy does not possess obvious bars, does that mean it probably does not have a "super-massive black hole" at its center?
I imagine that if you were in the vicinity of M63, say 100,000 light years above the plane of the galaxy, it wouldn't look like this. The bright central bulge would dominate the view, and you would see some bright individual stars, clusters, and nebulae on your side of the galaxy. And if you were on a planet orbiting a star in one of the spiral arms, it wouldn't look like a spiral galaxy at all, it would look like a milky way arching across the nighttime sky (assuming your planet uses low-wattage, fully-shielded, downward-pointing, warm-spectrum nighttime lighting!). We have a pretty good perspective on M63 from here.
As an aside, the pinks and blues in this photo want me to rename M63 the
Beadazzled galaxy! Do the brightness and saturation of those colors have anything to do with the fact that the central region and spiral arms are much brighter than the halo in this image? And am I using the terms brightness and saturation correctly?
[quote="quigley"]Gorgeous image. Makes me wish I could go there to see it first hand out of the window of a starship. Since this galaxy does not possess obvious bars, does that mean it probably does not have a "super-massive black hole" at its center?[/quote]
I imagine that if you were in the vicinity of M63, say 100,000 light years above the plane of the galaxy, it wouldn't look like this. The bright central bulge would dominate the view, and you would see some bright individual stars, clusters, and nebulae on your side of the galaxy. And if you were on a planet orbiting a star in one of the spiral arms, it wouldn't look like a spiral galaxy at all, it would look like a milky way arching across the nighttime sky (assuming your planet uses low-wattage, fully-shielded, downward-pointing, warm-spectrum nighttime lighting!). We have a pretty good perspective on M63 from here.
As an aside, the pinks and blues in this photo want me to rename M63 the [url=http://www.beadazzled.net/]Beadazzled[/url] galaxy! Do the brightness and saturation of those colors have anything to do with the fact that the central region and spiral arms are much brighter than the halo in this image? And am I using the terms brightness and saturation correctly?