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I’ve spent so much time recently looking at infrared images from the large Spitzer surveys GLIMPSE and MIPSGAL for Milky Way Project, that I sometimes forget there’s a new infrared space telescope on the block. WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer is a 40-cm telescope launched just over 2 years ago in December 2009, that’s been quietly imaging the entire sky from 3 to 25 microns. Although it’s a little smaller than Spitzer, its images are stunning and the survey will give us a cool new reference atlas of the sky at infrared wavelengths.

This great image was released at AAS today, showing a portion of the galactic plane in 4 infrared bands not unlike those we use in 3-colour Spitzer images: blue represents 3.4 µm, cyan 4.6 µm, green 12 µm and red 22 µm. Can you see the bubbles?

This particular version of the image is annotated with the names of the nebulae and star forming regions, and traces of nearby constellations.  More versions of the image and a detailed caption on the WISE webpages.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team