Explain it to me like I'm five:
Why can we only see 90° of the sky?
I look at the map at the bottom of the page and wonder why it isn't a circle. I'm obviously missing a key concept.
Why can we only see 90° of the sky?
I look at the map at the bottom of the page and wonder why it isn't a circle. I'm obviously missing a key concept.
The full map is actually a sphere. This visualization shows a thin slice of the Universe. Its thickness is about 10 degrees. More astronomical data is available but it is not possible to show all of it at once on a 2D map. The image would be completely saturated with dots.
It actually visualizes the slice depicted on the main page as a 3D rotation. I would struggle to explain the concept of arc slicing to a five-year-old though.
Does that mean their slice is only 1/36th of the whole picture?