Committed to PEOPLE'S RIGHT TO KNOW Vol. 5 Num 586 Sat. January 21, 2006       StarTech PhotoTech The Milky Way This Spitzer Space Telescope image released on January 10, shows the galactic center of The Milky Way galaxy (left). Taken with just one of Spitzer's cameras, the image highlights the region's exceptionally bright and dusty clouds, lit up by young massive stars. Individual stars can also be seen as tiny dots scattered throughout the dust. The top mosaic shows a portion of the galactic center that stretches across a distance of 760 light-years. A dazzling infrared image (top-right) shows hundreds of thousands of stars crowded into the swirling core of our spiral Milky Way galaxy. This false-color composite image shows the Cartwheel galaxy (bottom-right) as seen by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer's far ultraviolet detector (blue); the Hubble Space Telescope's wide field and planetary camera 2 (green); the Spitzer Space Telescope's infrared array camera (red); and the Chandra X-ray Observatory's advanced CCD imaging spectrometer-S array instrument (purple) . PHOTO: AFP