I like the United Kingdom InfraRed Telescope (UKIRT); they do amazing work and have been doing so for 25 years. However, they’ve just released one of the most stunning data sets I’ve seen for a long time – the first release from their deep infrared survey, UKIDSS. This is the deepest and largest infrared survey ever made, the result of work that’s been going on since 2005. Sadly I missed the press conference as I was working on my talk, but luckily, Pamela has the full story here. And if you’re more a pictures than a words person, I recommend you jump straight into the site here and explore the gallery. The images are great, but my favourite UKIRT image is still the one below – the Chicken nebula.
Update Stuart reminds me that there’s an amazing Zoomable image from the part of the survey that looks along the plane of the Milky Way.
Bunny Burton-Bradford on January 10, 2008
Hi Chris,
The links don’t work
…
Nick Cross on January 10, 2008
The link to the UKIDSS gallery is http://surveys.roe.ac.uk/wsa/gallery/
UKIDSS world release « The e-Astronomer on January 10, 2008
[...] As I warned just before Xmas in this post, the first world release of UKIDSS has now gone public, with a press release at the AAS. The blogosphere is picking it up, here, here and here. You have no idea how nice it feels after a couple of weeks of STFC-cuts politics.. This has been my baby since 1998 … but others have done much more work than me. Thanks especially Steve Warren and Nige Hambly. Steve doesn’t seem to have a home page. This isn’t him. [...]