Blog Post 3, WS 1.2, Problem 1: Drawing the Galaxy

Create an illustration of the Milky Way galaxy as viewed from outside the galaxy, viewed from the side and from above. You can draw by hand, or use a digital drawing tool such as Google Draw, Gimp or Illustrator. Post your illustration as a blog post, along with descriptive text of the figure. Your audience is a high school senior interested in astronomy, so don’t let them down with an obfuscated or incorrect description! Be sure to include the components in the list below. You may use any resource you find on the internet, but be sure that you have two sources for each bit of information you find so as to not post embarrassingly erroneous information. Wikipedia provides pretty solid information, but you should use library books, lecture notes, online books and/or Youtube videos as supporting information.
(a) Location of the Sun
(b) Thin/thick disks, bulge, halo
(c) Globular clusters
(d) The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC)
(e) Sgr A* (Black hole)
(f) Location of Orion star forming region, and the nearest and furthest (known) open clusters to the Sun
(g) Scale length and scale height (in order to draw galaxy to scale)

 

 Here we see the Milky Way galaxy as viewed from above.  The basic layout of the galaxy is a disk with a central bulge of stars and clusters with a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A* (Not to scale, exaggerated for ease of location) at the center.  The various "arms" of the galaxy are pictured and labeled above.  Spot "A" is the location of the furthest observed open star cluster from Earth, vbD-Hagen 217.  This object is around 12 kpc from our Sun.  Spot "B" is the location of the closest observed open cluster from Earth, Mamajek 1.  This object is only 97 pc away, very close on galactic scales.  Spot "C" is the location of the Orion Nebula, a place were new stars are born.  Aptly, it is located in the Orion arm of the galaxy.  Globular Clusters are scattered around the galaxy, but are concentrated in the rings and in the galactic budge/core.

Here we see the Milky Way as pictured from the side/edge.  The Galactic Bulge is very visible at the center of the galaxy. The light blue disk along the middle of the diagram consists of the Thick and Thin Disks where most of the stars in the galaxy reside along with the bulge.  Below th galaxy are two dwarf galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC).  These two dwarf galaxies are trapped in the Milky Way's gravitational field and it.  The yellow glow around the galaxy is the galactic Halo, a collection of stars, dust, and dark matter that is separate from the disks.  In elliptical galaxies, there is no clear break between the main part of the galaxy and the halo, but in spiral galaxies such as our galaxy, the break is very obvious.

References:
http://www.univie.ac.at/webda/recent_data.html
http://www.astrodigital.org/astronomy/milkywaygalaxy.html
http://www.sslmit.unibo.it/zat/images/cartography/M-Way_2.htm
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/AKARI_presents_detailed_all-sky_map_in_infrared_light/(print)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_coordinate_system
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/milkyway_info.html
https://dept.astro.lsa.umich.edu/ugactivities/Labs/MWgalStruct/index.html
http://earthsky.org/clusters-nebulae-galaxies/the-small-magellanic-cloud
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/06/09/the-first-globular-cluster-out/
http://archive.cosmosmagazine.com/news/milky-way-inner-halo-reveals-its-age/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Nebula

http://www.robertmartinayers.org/tools/coordinates.html

All diagrams were made using Microsoft Powerpoint for Mac 2011.