Deep Near-Infrared Survey of the southern sky

DENIS image of the galactic center

The picture is a three colour image of a typical DENIS field (12×12 arcminutes) roughly towards the center of our Galaxy. Each of the approximately 4000 dots is a star and most of them should be close to the actual center of the Galaxy. The colour of the dot shows how red the star is by itself or how much it gets red by intervening clouds. The colours of the stars in the left side of the field are all much redder because of the presence of such a cloud; in the lower right quarter a very dark cloud obscures a small area. Photographs in visual light of the same area contain only a very small fraction of all these stars: the light is extinguished by clouds because at visual wavelengths the extinction is so much stronger. This result is a standard product from the DENIS survey.