G'Day Ron;
Interesting photo.
The ABC article referred to Phil Plait's blog site which contains some very interesting words:
Quote:
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Note added later: It occurs to me there might be dust in the galaxy despite what I say in the next paragraph. That's because dust doesn't show up in the infrared very well, and one of the filters used was IR (as I note in a following paragraph). Also, the kind of camera used isn't as sensitive in the blue as it is in the IR, so that might also suppress seeing any dust that might be there. So take the next paragraph with -- haha -- a grain of salt.
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In the recent Hartley comet thread, I've learned to look very carefully at how these images are taken. This one was taken by the Hubble IR set-up.
If there was dust in the galaxy would it be visible in this photo ?
Perhaps not, according to Plait.
If it did have dust surrounding the galaxy, would it
really be so thin ?
Cheers
PS: I'm a bit of a Plait fan … I find him to be reassuringly honest. Which is great when he comments on releases .. one tends to get a more unbiased perspective on all this media stuff by checking out what he has to say !!