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To: PIF

Hubble picture of Spiral Galaxy M100. Left from the Wide Field Camera 1, right from the Wide Field Camera 3. Note the significant improvement in point-spread function. You call that "clearer"? Those dots are whole stars, and not little ones like our Sun. Planets don't even show up.

16 posted on 05/04/2019 4:42:33 PM PDT by NorthMountain (... the right of the peopIe to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed)
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To: NorthMountain; PIF
Why can Hubble get detailed views of distant galaxies but not of Pluto?

In short, to gauge how large these things appear in our sky, we can take the ratio of these things' sizes to their distances

For the galaxy, 50,000 light-years / 72 million light-years = 0.00069

For Pluto, 2400 km / 4675 million km = 0.00000051

Take the ratio of those two and you'll see that the galaxy appears 1300 times bigger than Pluto.

19 posted on 05/04/2019 4:57:43 PM PDT by DoodleBob (Gravity's waiting period is about 9.8 m/s^2)
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