GLIMPSE 360

A zoomable panorama from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows us our galaxy's plane all the way around us in infrared light.

Glimpse350 tn

A zoomable panorama from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows us our galaxy's plane all the way around us in infrared light. The 360-degree mosaic comes primarily from the GLIMPSE360 project, which stands for Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire. It consists of more than 2 million snapshots taken in infrared light over 10 years, beginning in 2003 when Spitzer launched.

GLIMPSE News Updates


Zoomable Panoramas

World Wide Telescope

Use Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope viewer to view the image in context and cross-fade to the visible-light sky.

Launch WWT  

Aladin Viewer

CDS Aladin Lite viewer offers shortcuts to regions of interest and image exporting.

Launch Aladin  


Download Large Format GLIMPSE 360 Data

Poster

Download the full resolution poster file for printing.


Planetarium Systems

These files assemble the GLIMPSE360 image in a single all-sky equirectangular projection. The resolution is vastly reduced from the native image scale, but the files should be easily incorporated into any software that renders a spherical sky dome from a single image.

The images are in galactic equirectangular coordinates centered at l, b = 0, 0. The files have an embedded alpha channel to facilitate compositing the GLIMPSE360 survey against other all-sky datasets.

Raw Data Files

The raw data files are very big. These images will not display properly in a browser, its best to right click and 'save link as' when downloading.

These source files each span 45 x 10 degrees and are in galactic coordinates using an equirectangular projection. They are all centered on galactic latitude of 0, and the final digits in the file names indicate the center galactic longitude of each tile.

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