Digging this back out from my archives! This is a very interesting project done when I was at Berkeley, where I took tons of astronomy classes (because they aren’t available in Singapore). In this lab, our team made use of a 4.5m radio telescope owned by UC Berkeley to map out the warp of the Galaxy.
In summary, our galaxy is not a flat spinning top, as most of the pictures show it to be. The arms of the galaxy actually have a little “tilt” in them with respect to the galactic plane, which means parts of it lie above the plane, and parts of it below the plane! Using the data we gathered from the radio telescope, I rendered a graphical representation of the galactic warp. The image is a little fuzzy, I hope to improve on my code in future and render a nicer looking image!
