NASA's WISE Eye Spies Initial Glimpse of the Starry Sky
This infrared photograph of a region in the constellation Carina near the Milky Way was taken shortly after NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) expelled its cover. The "first-light" image shows thousands of stars and covers an area three times the size of the moon. WISE will take more than a million alike pictures covering the whole sky.
The image was captured as the spacecraft stared in a fixed direction, in order to help standardize its pointing system. The mission's analysis will be done while the satellite continuously scans the sky, and an internal scan mirror counteracts the motion to create freeze-frame images. The team is working now to match the motions of the spacecraft and the scan mirror accurately.
This eight-second revelation shows infrared light from three of WISE's four wavelength bands: Blue, green and red correspond to 3.4, 4.6, and 12 microns, respectively.
More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu/.
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