Milky Way photos

Classical Mechanics Level 1

Are there any photographs of the Milky Way from this viewpoint?

Yes No

15 solutions

Michael Mendrin
Jun 12, 2015

We haven't yet found a supermassive object out there in the universe that's able to bend the light coming from our own Milky Way galaxy right back towards us. You know, kind of like a cosmic mirror. In theory it's possible. But I wouldn't wait for one to be discovered.

no it is totally wrong according to physics we can not take the photograph siting inside our home

Anush Airan - 5 years, 7 months ago

The problem with this is that it just showed a picture of it

Ezra Miles - 5 years, 6 months ago

its a picture of different galaxy to show what the question is asking

Matt Davis - 5 years, 6 months ago

@Matt Davis – thaydon't say wich milky way so it should be yes

Wim Scheyltjens - 5 years, 4 months ago

@Wim Scheyltjens – What? Milky way is our home galaxy other galaxies are names somthing else like Andromeda, LMC, etc.

Vikas K Bhat - 5 years, 4 months ago

@Wim Scheyltjens – Sometimes it's better to stay silent...

Mario Benzino - 5 years, 2 months ago

Not inside our home, because the atmosphere would distort all the light at that scale. The phenomenon Michael is talking about is Gravitational Lensing. (And like he said, taking a picture of the Milky Way lensed in that way is basically not going to happen.)

Alex Sage - 5 years, 6 months ago

Cyrus Shirkoohi
Jun 15, 2015

No Human spacecraft have actually reached far as far as a millimeter on the scale of this picture - therefore it's impossible for us to have taken a photograph from this vertically far viewpoint.

Moderator note:

It is already a long and difficult task to exit our Solar system let alone our galaxy!

I thought I was looking at it

A Former Brilliant Member - 3 years, 3 months ago

Manas K. Chowdhury
Jun 16, 2015

Total mismatch in minuscule size of camera , giganticity of the theoretical picture and behaviour of em waves !!

Moderator note:

Voyager 1: the furthest man made object doesn't come close to 0.01 lightyears away from Earth, let alone exiting the Milky Way which has a vast diameter of over 100 lightyears. To place a camera so that it could capture even a fraction of our galaxy, it would have to have traveled at 10,000 mph for ten of thousands of years. The technology for such a feat did not exist twenty years ago, let alone 10,000.

Didn't you mean "a diameter of 100 thousands lightyears" ? From what I calculated, going at 15 000 km/h (~10 000 mph) for 10 thousand years you would have traveled about 13 140 000 000 000 km or 13 trillion km. This is about 1.39 lightyears. In order to travel 100 thousand lightyears or 946 073 047 258 080 000 km (some estimates tell that the diameter of the Milky Way is 100 thousand lightyears, others tell 150 - 200 thousand lightyears), you would need 7 199 947 087.2 or about 7.2 billion years of travel at 15 000 km/h.

Marius Eduard Cojocea - 2 years, 8 months ago

Paul Nord
Aug 18, 2016

There are none taken by humans, certainly.

Christian Mark Sanzell
Jun 16, 2015

because of the size of our galaxy it is almost impossible yet in the current time to take a photo outside our galaxy

Moderator note:

Yes, we would have to travel hundreds of lightyears away from Earth first before accomplishing this task.

Tushar Kaushik
Jun 14, 2015

Well it is not possible till date to get the pictures of our galaxy. All that we see is just a artist's imagination

Moderator note:

I wouldn't use the word "artist's imagination". Mapping out our galaxy is a strenuous effort. We need to measure the infrared wavelengths from the universe to penetrate the galactic dust to pinpoint the location of our neighboring stars alone. This clusters of stars are useful in identifying the galaxy's shape. The general consensus is that our galaxy contain four large spiral arms which triggers the birth of stars. Thus we are able to shed new light on the Galactic structure by tracing these spiral arms using cluster analysis.

Jeffrey Higham
Mar 12, 2018

We're inside the Milky Way.

Craig Mitchell
Jan 28, 2018

There are no such photographs taken using a man made camera. However it is perfectly conceivable that one may have been taken by some alien lifeform located in another galaxy. As such the answer should really be that it is unknown.

Dinesh Nath Goswami
Jun 13, 2015

The photos of our galaxy from that viewpoint are just the artistic impressions of what our galaxy looks like.

Or sometimes photos of other galaxies are used to "show" how the Milky Way galaxy looks like. For most of the 20th century, we've been shown pictures of classic spiral galaxies that it's been said the Milky Way galaxy looks like, but that was before it was recently discovered that the Milky Way galaxy is actually a barred spiral galaxy, like the picture Josh has posted here. Cool, huh?

Meanwhile, the nearby Andromeda Galaxy is bigger and prettier, a classic spiral galaxy, and about to crash into the Milky Way galaxy. Mark your calendars.

Michael Mendrin - 6 years ago

And when that would happen, the humans on earth at that time would have an incredible cosmic lightshow continuing for the next millions of years.

Dinesh Nath Goswami - 5 years, 12 months ago

How can we take photos of other galaxies which are even farther than ours...?

Ojasvi Sharma - 2 years, 3 months ago

Munnangi Abhishekh Reddy
Mar 2, 2018

Photographing our milky way is like photographing our house being inside our house... When this is not possible, even the above case is impossible. There's no device that has ever been out of milky way to photograph milky way from that perspective.

Cullen McEwan
Feb 20, 2018

Who takes a selfie from above and posts it to Facebook?

Alexander De Biasio
Oct 9, 2017

Yes and No.
No - No human spacecraft has even gotten remotely close to leaving the milky way galaxy.
Yes - Aliens could have taken a photo of the milky way (Unlikely)

Michael Mason
Apr 12, 2017

They should specify human photographs. Who knows who else is out there taking pictures of us?

Good point.

Josh Silverman Staff - 4 years, 1 month ago

Lucas Haddad
Nov 17, 2015

There are several causes to it. First of all, a camera would need to travel from our planet to a long distance from our big galaxy and it would take a lot of light-years, and when it took the right place to shot, it would only get the image from as many years before as the camera was sent (of course light-year is a distance meter and year is a time meter, they are different, i'm just trying to make a understandble sentence). In second place, the camera would need to have a tremendous resolution to catch the entire milky way in one shot. Third but not less important, to the camera send us the image would be a really pain in the ass, because in that distance the bit-by-bit way that is used for long distances in space would take countless ages.

Maybe, there are different ways to do it, using waves, light, or other things like that, but i don't have the knowledge of it, sorry.

Lu Chee Ket
Oct 26, 2015

The arc of Milky Way in the sky and NGC 6744 which might resemble the Milky Way confirmed our thought. There is no one who had ever gone so far to take a photograph of our own galaxy namely the Milky Way. But sometime in a while before, we could have been miss-leaded by seeing photographs or illustrations of other galaxies as thought as they are our own galaxy.

Milky Way photos

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